


Apologies

by fallingflurry



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Completed, Love Letters, M/M, Pining, Post-Canon, Post-War, Severus Snape Lives, Slow Burn, literally a romance novel, neville is very competent and good, snape is horribly in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-18
Updated: 2020-09-19
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:47:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 39,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26531629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fallingflurry/pseuds/fallingflurry
Summary: Years after the battle of Hogwarts, Severus is just trying to put the past behind him and get along with his peers, including recently hired Neville Longbottom.Fully just a sappy romance novel about forgiveness, change and how to get past being a fascist and find love maybe.
Relationships: Neville Longbottom/Severus Snape
Comments: 26
Kudos: 90





	1. Apologies

What kind of a man is Severus?

He is finding it a question increasingly difficult to answer. He used to think he could define himself easily. He is good at what he does, he was a good spy, he was a horrible teacher but most of his students passed their exams. He knew what he like and didn’t like, in most parts of his life. He has spent the better part of his life in war, and what now then, when that isn’t the framework of his life? He realises slowly, after waiting and waiting for something to show up, some sign that no, actually, he doesn’t get to watch his Dark Mark fade into smooth skin, that no, this is it, and that, yes, he has no clue who he is now. Who is he really, now?

He isn’t in prison, he went through the hospital stay and the trial and getting back his job. Going through the facts in his head, he is free, then, and reasonably healthy, and employed. Stable. But that isn’t what a man is. He veers into thoughts too immense to grasp if he thinks about a purpose, but he can think about what he does. A man is his actions, isn’t he?

So, actions. Severus wakes up. He lies in bed for too long, feeling heavy and tired and as if he could melt into his mattress, or lie here forever. A permanent fixture of the castle, a marble monument that the students can gaze at when they feel like wallowing in someone else’s mistakes.

The rest of the day follows. Severus handles students that look younger and younger every day, feeling so old and tired and worn out. The new staff members are no help, to that tiredness. Draco, in the white Healer clothing, following Pomfrey around, looking so serious and attentive. When has Severus ever shown that kind of eagerness to learn, to improve, to listen? The energy that must take.

And Neville Longbottom, of course, the very symbol of his own decay. Sprout retired this year, something he never thought she’d do, leaving her teaching position to Longbottom, whom Severus now has to call Professor. This small, scared boy now a man. Sometimes Severus looks at him and something hurts, like he can feel his own bones disintegrating.

Longbottom’s actions speak for themselves. Everyone likes him, of course they do. He has had an apprenticeship under Sprout for a year, what Severus now knows was a training period for him to take over, and while Severus has been able to avoid him so far, the rest of the student body and the faculty have gravitated towards him as if he’s the sun. He does seem like the sun, some days. He can’t walk into a room without making it lighter, warmer. It’s annoying, but Severus had persevered, and now it seems he can’t just keep his head down until his apprenticeship is over, now it seems that Longbottom too is a permanent thing, a sign of an agonizingly slow replacement of the older generation. Most of the other teachers have of course been there so long that Severus can remember them from his time as a student. Was this how they felt, when he started teaching? He was 22, at the time, Longbottom and Draco are 25. Is this what it feels like, being replaced? All of them. Sprout is gone off somewhere in the countryside, Pomfrey is training Draco, even Flitwick has been talking about retiring. When Severus himself thinks of leaving Hogwarts he sees nothing but a black infinity stretching out in front of him, an unknown so vast and large that it only belongs in nightmares.

Minerva would of course never leave. She has taken to the role as headmaster well and he thinks she might keep it as long as Dumbledore did. And Dumbledore would have kept going for longer than he did, if Severus hadn’t killed him first. A thought he finds humorous, because anything else would be overwhelming.

“Guilt is rarely beneficial”, his therapist says when he describes this. A bespectacled woman, sensibly dressed, dark curly hair in a neat bun. She seems adequate at her job. He knows she’s adequate at her job. She knows all of his secrets and he comes to talk to her once a month, still, after three years. He hasn’t talked to a therapist before, but it was one of Minerva’s prerequisites for his returning to teach and after the begrudgingly awful first few months, he can admit that it has helped. He is miserable but the vast and unknowable future doesn’t seem quite so daunting or unmanageable anymore.

“I suppose you’re right,” he admits, looking at her hands on the notepad in her lap. Sometimes she writes things down, notices his staring and says he’s welcome to look. He doesn’t take her up on it.

“This young man, Neville Longbottom, can you tell me more about him? You are affected by this.” She doesn’t say it like a question, just a fact.

Her office is like this too, straightforward. Nothing like Severus imagined it would be like (either sterile and smelling of bleach or full of charts of emotions and decorative plants and perhaps one of those little sand gardens with the little rake). It is close to St Mungo’s, but the neighbourhood seems residential. He sits in a chair opposite her, both of them at the same level. He doesn’t even have to lie down. It is tidy, but not impersonal, soothing browns and living plants scattered by the large windows. Sometimes he Apparates there early and she is tending them, a watering can in one hand and a spray bottle in the other.

He tells her, all of it. About Severus’ behaviour in class and outside, picking on him, singling him out. No matter what he says about trying to keep up a façade, trying to make it look like he stayed loyal to Voldemort all those years, he can’t excuse that by saying he was playing a role. He knows that. He acted like that because being angry and cruel was easier than the alternative.

He tells her about trying to keep them safe that year he spent as headmaster, failing miserably. Watching as the Carrows did awful things. She sits there and listens, her face neutral.

He tells her about Ginny Potter, née Weasley, ignoring him at one of Potter’s functions, months ago, and then talking to Draco about it the following Monday. Not that Severus ever talks much at these gatherings of what’s left of the Order of the Phoenix, sees them as obligatory, asinine things to suffer through, but he had seen the face she made when Potter told her to bring an extra chair out because Snape was here. The tensing up of the upper lip, the small sigh. Severus knows how to read people, and she doesn’t like him very much, is what he says to Draco.

“Maybe it’s because of Neville,” he says, surprisingly quickly, spearing a piece of potato with his fork. They’re in the broom closet in the corridor leading to the Hospital Wing that Draco jokingly refers to as his office, Draco in the window alcove, Severus in the room’s only spindly chair. It’s quiet and cool. They do this most lunch hours, because neither of them like to make small talk and neither of them want to be alone. Outside the window the April rain lazily drips from the birch trees outside the castle.

“What do you mean?” Severus asks, nonchalantly. He knows what he means, but he wants Draco to say it so that he can’t ignore it.

Draco is silent for a long time, brushes his hair out of his face with a smooth gesture, and then answers carefully, “She’s fine with me and the only reason I can think of why she might be is that I talk to Neville sometimes.”

“When do you talk to him?” Severus huffs, ready to catch him in a bluff, but Draco swallows his food and explains that they have coffee sometimes. The annoyance at this is surprising.

“I don’t need her to like me. Or any of them, for that matter,” Severus says, and Draco generously shrugs, instead of pointing out that Severus was the one that initiated this conversation.

“I mean, would it hurt though? To say hi to him occasionally?” Severus is often proud of Draco, but never more so than when he displays this kind of competence, that Severus doesn’t know where he has gotten from. Certainly not his father, certainly not Severus. Narcissa, maybe, although her empathy mostly shines through in crises. Maybe this has nothing to do with any of them, maybe he has grown out of their control.

“I do say hello to him,” Severus says, defensive. “I just don’t see the point of…”

What he wants to say is that it would feel false to pretend like nothing is wrong with this picture, like Severus did nothing wrong. He feels ashamed. He has been hiding. He doesn’t continue his sentence, and they let it stay there in the closet, leave it there when they go back to their routine.

“So you’ve behaved badly, with differing amounts of justification, and now you’re threatened by the fact that you will have to spend time with this man you’ve wronged,” his therapist says, the scratching of the quill as an undercurrent of her voice. “Does that sound right?”

“I don’t agree with that. I’m not threatened. Perhaps by Pomona resigning. Other people’s youth and my own mortality and so on.”

“Or maybe this man’s presence is a reminder that your actions have consequences?” she says after a small pause, smiling gently. “A reminder of the personhood of others?”

He resists the urge to roll his eyes, and she looks at him, with a mildly amused smile that Severus thinks is quite charming. They could have been friends, he thinks, if he had friends, if he didn’t have to pay for someone to listen to his problems.

“Have you considered apologising?”

“Communication, right?” Severus murmurs, mostly to himself. It’s a joke, that her response to things is so often to try to communicate. She hasn’t often been wrong though. “I suppose I have considered it. I suppose I should.”

“Do you want to?” she presses.

“Yes,” Severus says, begrudgingly.

“Alright,” she says, when he’s made it clear he won’t go on. “If you think you can offer a satisfactory apology, I think that would be beneficial to both of you.”

“What do you mean, beneficial to both of you?”

“An apology is on the surface level for the person being apologised to, but it also serves the purpose of letting you verbalise your guilt, to connect to our earlier point. Of course, an apology’s primary purpose is to signal to the wronged that they’re safe and that the hurt they’ve experienced is recognised and won’t happen to anyone else, but you shouldn’t underestimate the good it can do to you. What do you think?”

\--

It is October. The new school year has been rainy, so far, nothing but rain and mud. Today, he wakes up, and has decided what to do. He feels, if possible, even heavier. It is difficult to get out of bed. It is supposed to be difficult.

He hasn’t apologised to anyone, except Minerva, when asking for his job back. No one else has asked him to.

He has been watching him, since school started. He seems to be doing well, better than Severus did when he first started teaching. Of course, as he has thought before, Longbottom is likeable. Severus has always thought of that kind of likeability as untrustworthy, but Longbottom’s version of it doesn’t strike him as suspect. It seems earned, based in kindness. Severus can appreciate that, these days.

He knows from Draco that he drinks coffee in the afternoon, after his classes, so he waits in the hallway by the greenhouses for the stream of fifth year students attending Longbottom’s last class of the day, a mug of coffee spelled to stay warm in his hand, still steaming. He waits, and waits, looking out at the rain until he can hear the footsteps of the students and then backs into the shadows, waits for them to pass and then heads out into the water, over the path leading to Greenhouse three.

When he gets to the classroom, Longbottom is cleaning up, by hand, lifting stacks of pots back to where they’re supposed to be. The pitter patter of the water hitting the greenhouse roof dims when he steps across the threshold.

“Longbottom,” Severus says and he stops his tidying slowly, turns his head without a rush. He’s handsome, in a way all young people are, soft and fresh. His nose has been broken, at some point, during the battle maybe. It’s straight, but there’s a small hitch in it that Severus hasn’t noticed before. It makes him look competent. He isn’t startled by Severus being here.

Severus holds out the coffee and Neville’s eyes go to it slowly, like he’s never seen the gesture before, like he doesn’t know what the beverage is. Slowly he accepts it and holds cautiously in one hand.

“What’s this for?” he asks, not angry, just earnestly confused.

“It’s for you.” Severus is defensive, he can hear it in his own voice, can feel it in the way he wipes his hand off on his pants, can sense it in his own stance. He can’t stop himself, though. He hovers. “I was already… I thought I’d save you the trip.”

“Did you put something in it?” he asks, smiling, on the verge of laughing.

“Did you want anything in it?” he asks after a small pause, and then realises what Neville means. “Oh. No, I wasn’t planning on poisoning you this afternoon.”

“Not this afternoon at least. Thank you,” he says, still smiling carefully. Like most conversations that are important to him, Severus wishes he’d said something else. He wishes he were someone else.

“Could I have a word?” Severus says and watches as Longbottom takes a sip of the coffee and sets it down on his desk.

“Absolutely,” he says, already turning away from him. “Would you mind if I tidied up as we speak?”

“I… No, that would be fine,” Severus says. This is not what he expected. What did he expect? That Longbottom would be frightened of him? That he would refuse the coffee, this tiny peace gift? After a year of complete silence, he doesn’t seem unnerved by the fact that Severus now wants to talk. Maybe he wanted him to reject him before he could even start. That would be easier. ‘I tried, he doesn’t want to talk’. But no, that’s not reality.

He hovers by the desk as Longbottom shuffles papers, carries his waste basket around the long worktable in the middle of the room, to toss the scraps of roots and leaves that can’t be saved. Some plant parts he examines, finds they fulfil some criteria and carefully places them in the breast pocket of his robes. Brown robes, in a material that looks convenient and comfortable. Well fitting.

Severus has rehearsed this in his quarters, but this has set him on edge. He seems so unmoved, so pleasant. “Since you’ve taken over the position of Herbology professor, it seemed fitting for me to offer an apology,” he says, and Longbottom finally stops picking at the mess his students have left.

“Oh?” he says, vaguely interested now. He lowers the waste basket to his hip and looks at him, fiddling with something on the table, a root.

Severus has to look away from him. He does demand interest, in an understated way. Understated to a degree that makes people lean in to see the details of his face when he speaks, clamour for his attention and approval. Or maybe this is just in Severus’ head, because in this conversation he desperately wants his approval.

“I’m sorry, for the way I’ve behaved,” Severus says, his eyes trained on Longbottom’s hands. He doesn’t like this. This doesn’t feel like catharsis, or whatever word his therapist used, not at all. He barrels on. “You were a child and you didn’t deserve it. I was purposely… cruel. There’s no excuse for that. I’m trying to be better.”

He looks up and sees Longbottom’s frowning face from across the table. He breathes, seems to bite the inside of his cheek, a small and nervous gesture that Severus recognises as a habit. “This isn’t necessary,” he says, finally. “I’m capable of, maybe not camaraderie, but certainly professionalism.”

“Right,” Severus says, nodding. He doesn’t mean it to be confrontational, but he can’t help the displeased note in his voice.

“Regardless of what you might think, you’re not the worst thing to happen to me. Please.” He’s still not angry, but he is roused, speaking in uncharacteristically clipped sentences. “I don’t care,” he continues, when he his jaw has stopped tensing up. “It’s not… You know what, thank you for the coffee. And the apology.”

Severus has learned, finally, to stay quiet in situations like these, so that’s what he does, until he feels like his hands might start shaking with the frustration of it. He looks down at them, confused and surprised that they’re steady.

“Right,” he says again, when Longbottom just looks at him. “Thank you for listening.”

\--

All he feels is awkwardness and anxiety. No comfort, no closure. Longbottom may have listened, but he didn’t accept the apology, and Severus feels like he barrelled through a locked door, unwelcome, unwanted. He doesn’t feel better.

Which is of course not the point. He looks at himself in the mirror when he gets back to his quarters, finds himself mouthing the words his therapist used. Beneficial to both of you. It doesn’t feel like it made either one of them happier, but maybe it will after a while. Maybe he needs to wait. He runs a thin hand over his face, meets his own dark eyes in the mirror, watches the thin beginnings of crow’s feet at the edges of his eyes. Thin tendrils of black hair, not greying yet, crowding around his face. Not quite long enough to hide the scar on his neck left by Nagini, but the collar of his robes are high enough only the top of the patch of red skin can be glimpsed. He looks like the same man as he always has been. Maybe it was foolish to expect a fresh start. Nothing is ever fresh, there are no beginnings and ends like that.

During the weekly staff meeting the next morning, he watches Longbottom as Minerva goes on about the Halloween dinner and the amended schedule for the Quidditch matches. He doesn’t look upset. His face is calm, he even speaks to Severus once or twice, tells him good morning and performs some trivial small talk about his curriculum for the seventh years. Hands large and calm and cupped around his coffee, nails short. They look like useful hands. His hair is longer now than when he was younger, the bowl cut is gone. Still the same sandy, light brown, now messier and shoved out of the way behind his ears. He’s handsome, in a steady and understated way, round face a little sturdier around the jaw. Heavy and firm where Severus is skinny and sinewy, and just about perfectly his height.

He is calm, is the conclusion he means to draw. When he stops Severus as he is about to walk out the door, he is almost startled, is almost nervous that Longbottom will have noticed him trying to analyse him and his appearance and his emotions. What is the most embarrassing, out of those options?

“Can I speak to you for a second?” he asks, and his mouth forms into a closed mouth smile meant to ease Severus’ tension. Severus was never any good at that, at easing others’ tension.

“Of course,” he mumbles, still caught off guard, and Longbottom gestures smoothly to the door.

“I’ll walk you to your class.”

Severus follows him awkwardly and then sidles up next to him. His walk is slower than Severus’, as if he’s in no rush to get where he is going. Severus supposes he isn’t either. The third floor classroom isn’t far from here and he has nothing to prepare before his class of third years arrive. A lecture on Boggarts, next class the spellcasting. Nonetheless, the pace and the space for conversation it creates unnerves him.

“I realise I may have been a little bit harsh yesterday,” Longbottom says, as they walk through the hallway towards the stairs, shoes tapping against the stone. “You caught me off guard.”

“I took no offense,” is the only thing Severus can think to say.

“Would you mind if I asked you about it?”

About what? Severus thinks, but he clears his throat and agrees anyway.

“You said you were working towards behaving better. What does that mean? How?”

“I…” Severus is rarely this tongue tied. But of course, he is comparing to before the war, something so different from his life now that it can hardly compare. Of course, often when he speaks the wrong thing comes out. He has a hard time with first impressions, he’s bad at apologising, he’s bad at being kind and generous and caring, something that seems to come so naturally to Longbottom.

Longbottom slows to a crawling pace as they approach the classroom. The hallway is empty, and Severus can hear his lungs working as he takes a deep breath, shuffles his feet and then meets his gaze, straight on. “I took the job expecting a lot of awkward silences, not an apology. I didn’t think you were capable of one.”

“I’ve been… talking to someone… After my…” he begins and then presses his lips together. They’re not friends, he and Longbottom, and he wouldn’t speak like this to any of his colleagues. It’s not that he thinks that it’s none of Longbottom’s business, it just seems painfully irrelevant, what he does in his spare time. “It doesn’t matter.”

But, Longbottom has understood anyway. “The apology did have a ring of therapist to it,” he says, smiling gently. “I don’t mean that it sounded insincere, or that there’s anything wrong with that. I’m not unfamiliar with therapists, is what I mean.”

Severus stays quiet, suddenly remembering that he actually does need to prepare, he needs to go down to his quarters and get the literature he wanted to reference, but it seems more important to stay here, to listen to Longbottom. He has a pleasant voice. Nothing about him is unpleasant, he didn’t think there was back then either. A certain kind of familiar weakness maybe, that he despised, which isn’t exactly gone now, but it is sharper, it is sturdier and less vulnerable. Kindness, he realises is the word he is looking for, and the defencelessness that comes with it. Still in him now, the way he talks, the way he moves and smiles, but unwavering now. Undefeatable.

“An apology is nice and I appreciate the effort and the introspection, but I think it would mean a lot to me if you backed that up with action. You know the workshop I do with the older students? About the war?”

“Vaguely.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve had two workshops so far and I have some more planned, among them a few guest speakers. You know, some ‘prominent figures’ aka Harry and Hermione, McGonagall. I tried to have Binns talk a little about it in a historical sense, but he fell asleep before I finished asking him. Some other people. Draco has said he’d speak,” he says, and Severus can feel his jaw clenching, because he knows what’s coming. “It would be great, I think, if you’d be willing to talk also. We could do a panel talk with you and Draco. You’re the only former Death Eaters that I think would even be willing to consider it, or that I’d be able to contact.”

“Talk about what?” Severus says. He says ‘former Death Eaters’ with an ease Severus rarely hears. It’s either disdainfulness or cautious, careful soft words, as if Severus would be surprised to be called it. He prefers this, the directness of it.

“Oh, you don’t have to prepare anything, if you don’t want to. Mostly I think the students will have questions. So, an hour or two with answering their questions about your experiences and-“

“Why would you want two Death Eaters to talk?” he asks, his voice a little too loud, and thankfully muffled by the noise of his students arriving for class. Longbottom glances over at them quickly and takes a step away, moving back towards them to leave.

“We can talk later, maybe? Good luck with class!”

While the students mill into the classroom, Severus stares at his back, that cheerful good luck etched into his brain long after Longbottom has turned the corner.

\--

“It might be nice,” Draco says, into his food. “Do you not think so?”

“Nice?” he asks and puts his bowl down on the rickety table they’ve brought in here. He’s suddenly not very hungry.

“You know what I mean. I think it’s good to talk about it.”

Severus scoffs. “Absolutely. Scarring a room full of teenagers with war stories. Just let it die, like everything else.”

“Harsh,” Draco says, smirking and taking a sip of his drink. “Even for you.”

He crosses his legs and uncrosses them restlessly. He wants to do something. He wants one of those evenings he spends locked in the Potions classroom, until he can see the faint morning light through the high windows and the drawn curtains. Just working, until he doesn’t have to think anymore, until his hands move by themselves. Useful hands.

“I’ll do it if you do it,” Draco continues into the silence, sounding young and vulnerable. There are not a lot of things Severus wouldn’t do, for Draco Malfoy. A kinship, but more than that. He doesn’t see a lot of himself in Draco, but he does see a version of himself maybe afforded a different life, different choices.

“Fine,” he says, and the next Monday they’ve set a date. November 4th, seven o clock, after classes and dinner.

By then the mud and rain have turned to ice and brown, wet snow, and that seems fitting. That’s what Severus feels like, the trampled, muddy snow on top of the cold hard ground. He doesn’t say that to his therapist. She thinks the panel is a good idea. She says what Draco says, but couched in that therapist verbiage that he can now say he is familiar with. At least one thing he has in common with Longbottom, then.

“I’m expecting about 30-40 people. That’s how many have signed up, at the moment. We may have a few stragglers.” Longbottom sits in the sofa in the teachers’ lounge, no coffee with him now. A meeting, he’d said. Tomorrow they’ll have the panel, in the divination classroom for some reason. Maybe because Sybill volunteered it. She loves Longbottom’s initiative. She is what Severus was afraid his therapist would be, always talking about her feelings, until there’s nothing else in the room but her.

Severus dislikes her, he dislikes the location, he dislikes the roundness of the room, feeling looked down upon by being lower than his students. An amphitheatre, like they are gathered to watch him fight someone to the death. Wouldn’t that be a surprising twist to the evening? They say screw it to talking and fight to the death instead?

“I don’t know if you’ve attended any of the other talks?”

“I went to McGonagall’s and Granger’s,” Draco nods and neither of them wait for Severus to admit he hasn’t been to any of them.

“Good! It’s going to be kind of like that. If you’ve prepared something to say, that’s great, but if you haven’t I think the conversation will flow pretty well anyways. I’ll talk a little bit to the students beforehand, I’ll introduce you and then I’ll ask these questions.” He hands them a parchment each and Severus glances at the questions. They’re not too boring but not too gaudy either, less about sequences of events and more abstract. When they have both skimmed it, he continues talking. “So, uh, after that the students might ask some questions. I haven’t pre-screened them, but they’re usually quite well behaved.”

“Who are you letting attend?” Severus asks, while Longbottom takes a breath to pace himself.

“I was only allowed to invite the 5th, 6th and 7th years. So you’re allowed to keep the conversation… Well, not too graphic, but these are kids that remember the war. The second one, at least,” he adds, glancing at Severus. “If I think a question is out of line, I’ll interrupt, and if you don’t want to answer something you can say so and I’ll shut them down. Does that sound alright?”

After their talk, Draco is pale and solemn, but he insists he is fine. He wants to go through with this and Severus won’t let him sit there alone. He tells him it’s going to be fine.

He’s doing it for himself too. He wants something from Longbottom, some sort of approval. Forgiveness feels farfetched, like a warm baptism that Severus will drown in, but approval is right. He wants the respect and the companionship of the faculty, his peers. Longbottom has that, Longbottom is the very symbol of it. If he can make Longbottom stand him, can’t he make anyone stand him? He’d love to be allowed to be a planet circling him, feel that warmth for a minute or two. It’s going to be fine.

\--

Severus is alternatively too cold and too warm as he sits next to Draco in the pit of the Divination classroom. It smells like incense and cooling candle wicks. Sybill is undoubtedly hovering somewhere in the back of the room, behind the students, offering them tea and biscuits, but thankfully she hasn’t approached them yet. Draco fiddles with his glass of water, nervous and determined all at once. Severus is grateful he has had so much training in hiding his thoughts.

“Right,” Longbottom says, loud enough for the chatter to die down even without an amplifying spell. “Settle down, yes?”

Quills tense over parchment, feet settle against the rugs littered across the room and bodies sink down into soft chairs. When the movement has stopped, Longbottom sits down in the chair furthest to the right, furthest away from Severus.

“Alright then,” Longbottom says. “Before we get to our guests I’ll go over the usual, if you don’t mind.”

Severus has never seen Longbottom teach before. He’s good. He talks to them like Lupin did, like he’s a slightly more well-informed friend. Comforting, paternal. A kind and patient older brother. Lupin’s teaching, another thing Severus ruined for everyone. He closes his eyes for a little longer than a blink and breathes. When he opens his eyes again, the thought has passed.

“This class is not in any way obligatory,” he says, serious. He’s not reading from a paper, but these rules must be written down. He has had three of these talks before, maybe he has memorised this. “If you need to leave at any point, for any reason, that’s fine, you don’t need to ask permission, it won’t affect your grade in any of your classes. If you want to talk, about anything, my choice in questions or anything else, you can come talk to me afterwards or Headmaster McGonagall, or your head of house. When you ask your questions later, keep things respectful and to the point.”

He pauses slightly, takes a sip of water and the room listens. Severus has never achieved this sort of attention, not without intimidation.

“The panel we have today is special, in several ways,” Longbottom says, to the silent room. “Our guests today are familiar, to all of us, and they’re also special because both Draco Malfoy and Severus Snape are former Death Eaters. Emphasis on former. I can assure you that you’re safe in this room and in this school. We have an opportunity here for curiosity and empathy, and if not that, understanding.”

When he goes quiet, the whole room breathes. He is charming, on stage like this. Sympathetic.

“Alright then,” he says, smiling gently and efficiently. “Today we have invited Draco Malfoy, whom we know as Healer Malfoy, hi. Maybe some of you have run into him in the Hospital Wing.”

Draco swallows his water and smiles a closed mouthed smile at Neville and then does a half hearted wave at their audience. “Hi. Thank you.

“We’ve also invited Severus Snape, which all of you have in DADA. Welcome.”

“Thank you,” Severus says and straightens a little in his chair, ignoring the students and the scratching of the few quills. It feels like a parody of a talk show, one of those muggle ones where everything is just a little too stiff, the lights are just a little too bright, no matter how dim they actually are.

“So, we’ll start with some of my questions. Can you tell us a little about the events that led you to become Death Eaters? When did you join Voldemort and receive your Dark Mark?”

Severus does a small gesture so that Draco knows he can go first, and he does. He tells them about his family, their beliefs in the superiority of magical blood, purebloods. He tells the room about his father, in the first war, and then himself in the second one. The loneliness, the pressure, the guilt, the fear. How joining Voldemort felt like the only real option at the end. Then he clasps his hands together, smiles up at the students without any emotion behind his eyes and then mirrors Severus’ gesture, to give him the floor.

“And you, Severus?” Longbottom encourages.

The sound of his name, the shape of his mouth around it, startles him. “I became a Death Eater during the first war.”

“Do you want to elaborate?” Longbottom asks after the silence stretches on a little too long. He doesn’t smile now, but looks serious and calm, a small crease in between his eyebrows.

“I received my Dark Mark after I graduated, so I must have been 18. That was… eight years after the war first started.”

“What was that like? Do you remember the early years of the first war?” Longbottom prods.

“I was a child. I can’t say anything particularly insightful.”

“Alright,” Longbottom says, not completely satisfied. “We have of course gone over the political climate before the open warfare in both the first and the second war. We don’t need accuracy or insights, just your experience of it.”

He says the last part to the audience, to remind them of the context. To put Severus in context.

“People were scared,” Severus says. That’s true. He tries to do his best, describing what that was like. The escalating cruelty and increasing number of attacks on muggles, muggleborns, squibs, goblins. Anyone who was deemed threatening by the purebloods who saw their power diminishing. “When he announced himself to the world, Voldemort, I was ten or eleven. When I graduated, the Death Eaters had gained quite a foothold. Particularly in the circles I frequented.”

“What kind of circles do you mean?” he asks and when Severus glowers in his direction, he adds, “I hate to paraphrase but to summarise what Draco said… He mentioned the prevalence of belief in blood purity, among purebloods and, as a result of Salazar Slytherin’s belief in the same, among the Slytherins at this school. As a young man in the middle of the first war, as a student at this school, was that your experience as well? What was the environment like, the expectations?”

This feels like a therapy session. How does that make you feel? Tell me about your experiences. Go on. He keeps his eyes on Longbottom and starts talking again, until he gets it all out. “My father was a muggle, I was raised in a muggle home. He never… My mother wasn’t often allowed to live as a witch. In that sense, coming to Hogwarts, joining the wizarding world at large was freedom. I would have done anything to keep that sense of freedom, even at the expense of others. The blood supremacy of the pureblood witch and wizard was a given, in Slytherin especially, and the way they, the way _we_ spoke about muggleborns, anyone impure… I was a halfblood. I am a halfblood. I would have done anything not to be disregarded, to be grouped in with the people my peers had so much disdain for. And the power of dark magic, the power that Voldemort showed, at the time. Excepting Albus he was unrivalled. There was no one with that kind of power. With that power he promised us an escape from the fear he had created.”

Longbottom looks satisfied. “Thank you,” he says, sincere, and Severus breathes. He doesn’t like to talk about his father, or his childhood, or the first war. The first one. For him there’s only one, for him the first one never ended. He knew the Dark Lord would return, because Albus told him so, and because he had stood in that inner circle and watched him do things no living man should be able to do. Unthinkable things. Things he didn’t like to think about.

As he has been lost in thought, Longbottom has wrapped up the first part of the discussion, and suddenly the room is alive again. Severus is too aware of his body, of the weight of his limbs and the beating of his heart.

“Severus?” Draco asks, paler than usual and unsure, or maybe concerned. He stays that way until Sybill comes to lead them out to the balcony adjacent to the classroom, to get some air, she says. She doesn’t stay, or hover, and Severus is grateful.

He watches Draco closely, as he takes deep breaths of the cool evening air, and then straightens, brushes his hair behind his ears.

“Do you think this is where she goes to get high?” Draco murmurs under his breath and looks down at the light spilling out from the tower’s lower floors. Severus smiles.

“I’m sure,” he says and puts one hand on Draco’s shoulder, for both their sakes, and joins him in looking out at the dark blue sky and the steep cliffs below them. “I’m proud of you,” he says, in a sudden urge to comfort and steady and express whatever he’s feeling in his stomach. The words sound and feel strange as they come out of his mouth, but this whole evening is strange. He says them anyway. “This was a good idea. It was… brave.”

“What happened to letting it die?” Draco answers, his gentle smirk the only thing Severus can read in the dark.

“I was wrong,” he says. “About that as well.”

\--

They go inside after their ten minute break, to find Longbottom talking to a group of students in the front row of chairs, mixed in terms of houses. He’s smiling, laughing, they’re talking about schoolwork, as far as Severus can tell, but the joy of it puts him on edge. When he and Draco are back in their seats, sipping their lukewarm water, he feels as tense as when he left the room.

They begin, again, with Longbottom reminding the pupils of the basic rules, and then he starts taking questions. The first of them are for Draco (by far the least intimidating of them, so Severus thinks that’s understandable) and then a few harmless ones for him as well. Did the Dark Mark hurt, what were their experiences in their trials in the Ministry, did they fight in the Battle of Hogwarts. They’ve warmed up, and despite the tenseness in his stomach, he can answer these easily, elaborate to an extent that makes Longbottom nod thoughtfully.

And then, one of the fifth years shifts in his seat and raises his hand. Longbottom noticeably reacts, his body language turns tense and he looks down at his notes before giving the boy the floor.

“So, this one is for Professor Snape,” he says, his voice slow and slightly high pitched. He leans forward as he talks, as if he is so eager to be understood that he can’t help himself. “So you were with Voldemort during the Battle? What was that like? What did you talk about? What was he like?”

Severus swallows and sits still, not quite stiff. Longbottom looks like he might interrupt, but Severus starts talking before he can.

“Before he slit my throat we had a wonderful conversation,” Severus says in his iciest tone, the one he normally uses for stupid questions, and that earns a few snickers from the crowd. The kid smiles too, uneasily, and then opens his mouth again.

“But, like, what was he like?” he says, the smile still half on his lips. Severus hates it, the smile, the pale, pimply face that shapes it, the interest in his voice.

“Nervous,” Severus says, staring at him as he answers. “Paranoid. Grasping at straws. He wasn’t a pleasant man to be around at the best of times, but during the battle he was… erratic.”

The boy looks visibly disappointed and annoyed, leaning even further forward in his seat. “But,” he says, and one of the other students groans, which makes the room erupt into nervous laughter. He does this a lot, then, doesn’t know when to stop talking. Severus knows the type. He was the type. Quiet, knowledgeable, not much patience for socialising and other people. Pushing people away, sometimes on purpose but mostly not. The boy shrugs the laughter off, or pretends to, with a little glance down at his feet. “You were one of his closest confidantes. This whole thing about the Elder Wand, him trying to kill you over it, him wanting it so badly… He had all this power already, why go after something in a children’ story? It seems like he would-”

“You expected him to be cleverer than that?” Severus asks and the boy shrugs.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Oh, fuck off, Hitchens,” one of the other boys says loudly, half joking and the other half not at all joking, and at that Longbottom raises his hand in protest.

“Alright, we’ve gotten off topic,” he says, his voice raised over the murmurs and laughter and the angry rumbling that has erupted in the room. “Let’s just-“

“No, I can answer this,” Severus says, and Draco clears his throat nervously next to him. “I’d like to answer.”

Longbottom waves his hand once more in the air, raising his voice more and more until the room goes quiet again.

“He wasn’t cleverer than that. He was a sad, evil old man who had so much power he couldn’t stop grasping for more. He was never going to live out his vision of a ‘clean’ wizarding Britain. Who is clean? Would you trust that he stopped killing before he got to you? In my case, he didn’t.”

The room is quiet, and all Severus can focus on is Draco’s breathing next to him. Uneven.

“Fascism is per definition illogical. It is stupid. It’s no way of running anything, much less a country, an empire. He wasn’t clever, he just knew how to profit from fear. Him being desperate enough to search for answers in children’s stories isn’t surprising. Him dying at the hands of a seventeen year old is not surprising. It’s the only outcome that was even remotely plausible.”

The boy, Hitchens, presses his lips together, and then looks away.

\--

The questions die off after this one, the room feeling finished with all of it, after his too long answer. Longbottom gives them some talking points and tells them the date for the next talk, how to prepare, and tells them again that he’s available to talk. And then it’s over, and Draco disappears into the crowd with a short, “I have to go, see you tomorrow,” and Severus stands there, while the students pack up their belongings, talking amongst themselves. About homework, dating, the upcoming Quidditch match. These trivial things that seem so small next to the memory of bleeding out on the floor, which is so vibrant and present at all times.

“I’m sorry about the way… that escalated,” Longbottom offers quietly, while Severus tries to find a way to drag himself out of his thoughts and leave the room. The last of the students has shoved her quill and ink in her bag and headed out, Severus can hear the click clacking of shoes against the stone of the staircase outside the open classroom door. Sybill is thankfully nowhere to be seen.

“Why was he in the room in the first place?” Severus says, meaning that Longbottom obviously knew. This has happened before.

“I can’t ban people from showing up,” Longbottom says, his voice soft and calm. Severus can tell he thinks he was too harsh. “And don’t you think it could be useful for him to hear about it from someone… someone who was there? Who can remind him that this affects real people? This is what the whole thing is for, not just to convince people who already share our opinions. They need to hear that-“

“It’s admirable that you’re attempting to teach teenagers about empathy, but I promise you that no amount of hugs or understanding or acceptance could have stopped me from becoming a Death Eater. You can’t stop something like this by being nice.”

Longbottom frowns, a small line appearing between his brows. “I disagree,” he says, quietly, firmly, as if he’s saying something so obvious and clear that he can’t believe their opinions differ. Maybe Severus was reading into things. Maybe he jumped to conclusions. Maybe this is just his nerves and the need to stop feeling so helpless.

Severus deflates, as if some switch inside him turns off. His body isn’t so quick to understand, and his grip on his chair is like rock, his knuckles are white. Slowly he relaxes his hands and watches the blood flow back into them.

“I think you handled it brilliantly,” Longbottom says, voice and grey eyes serious. “I’ll follow up with him in a few days and we’ll see if it registered. This is part of why I took the job. To be able to do this. I do believe in it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ~terf free zone, fuck clean off joanne~
> 
> i'm so sorry i'm not going to finish let's pretend this song won't end right now, i locked the word doc with a password and forgot what the password was, which i fully know is clown shit, i'm so sorry. i have at least finished this and will post all of it asap. hope you enjoyed, it gets even more sappy.


	2. Forgiveness

“Do you not think he has forgiven you?” his therapist asks, curious. “Would it bother you if he hadn’t?”

“Yes,” Severus says, without thinking. “It would bother me.”

“Why?” she asks. “I’ve known you for quite some time now and you don’t strike me as a man who cares about being liked.”

Severus huffs out something close to a laugh and shrugs, which doesn’t please her.

“Or is it that you’ve gotten used to not being liked?”

This theory stings more, but she doesn’t wait for him to protest.

“I think it’s admirable to make an effort to make friends,” she says, as a finishing thought. “It puts you in a vulnerable position, but there’s strength in vulnerability as well. Bravery.”

\--

Severus has friends. Most of them in prison now, of course, and the friendships are built on mutual ideas that Severus grew out of before he properly adopted. Most of his friends either think he cheated his way out of prison or he cheated his way into their lives, and that is not a basis for a very fruitful social life, fine.

So, yes, he wants to be Longbottom’s friend. The faculty has warmed up to him, definitely, now that Longbottom talks to him during meetings, says hello in the hallways now and then. Sometimes they eat lunch together. He and Draco and Longbottom sit in the faculty room on the first floor together, eat their lunch and talk. Most days now they do not hide out in the broom closet, and it feels close to how it did before his brief period as Headmaster. Severus is always tolerated, but the tolerance seems to come easier now.

Minerva smiled at him the other day. Sybill doesn’t seem so afraid. He isn’t nervous when he has to make small talk anymore, at least not as much.

Longbottom is a good listener, he notices during these lunches, something that does not surprise him. Mostly Severus is quiet and listens to him talk to Draco, who can blather on about anything, a charming little quirk of his upbringing, not being able to decipher what details on his life others will find interesting. It’s a good sign, the talking. A sign of him not overthinking things, which is good. Severus has seen it when he meets that girlfriend of his, the few times they’ve had dinner together. Longbottom seems to bring out the same thing.

Longbottom nods, asks questions, remembers details days and weeks later. The name of a childhood pet, a food Draco mentions he likes, the specific issues with some students, the name of a virus he’s interested in. Sometimes Draco drags Severus into the conversation, of course. Their three areas of expertise intersect wonderfully. Longbottom grows something that Severus can make into a potion that Draco can administer to a patient. They have surprisingly interesting conversations, sometimes to the degree that Severus dislikes leaving the table after they’ve finished eating.

But no private coffee breaks, like Draco and Longbottom have. Draco’s schedule is of course easier to manage than Severus’ full schedule of classes, so he can join Longbottom after work some days, but still. Severus feels something close to jealousy.

It’s that sunny quality he has, the gravitational pull. Severus wants his attention more than he likes to think about. Sometimes Severus makes him laugh, and he feels the pride swell up in his chest before he can stop it.

So he knows that Longbottom is likeable. Not that knowing it isn’t his fault, that Longbottom is so naturally likeable, makes it seem natural or removes the embarrassment when he jumps on the opportunity to spend the entirety of the Christmas party with him.

Minerva spends the entirety of the pre winter break meeting going over the festivities, the dinner, the dance. A dance. They never had that when Severus grew up, but Minerva says something about it being for “interhouse solidarity”, and he supposes that makes sense. It seems like this might also be Longbottom’s idea, to have more activities for the entire school, less animosity and competition. Severus is busy thinking about the uproar that would happen if he tried to ban the Quidditch matches, and almost misses the part where Longbottom volunteers to chaperone.

“I’ve never been a chaperone. I’d like to try,” he says, two fingers off from the table as if he’s about to raise his hand to speak in class. Severus watches him, the fingers falling back down to the table, touching the warm porcelain of his coffee cup gently. He has dirt under them, his fingernails, and Severus draws the conclusion that he must have already been up, before this morning meeting, tending to the plants in the greenhouses. Or maybe the plants in his quarters. Severus has learned, from careful prodding of Draco, who has been invited once or twice, that he has decorated with an abundance of plants, that he sometimes brings special cases in with him from the classrooms. Severus thinks of his therapist and her watering can and her spray bottle and tries to imagine Longbottom doing that. Walking from pot to pot, touching the leaves softly, without disturbing. But that seems out of character. He switches scenario. Longbottom with his fingers deep in warm and soft soil, lifting out roots out of deep ceramic pots.

“Wonderful,” Minerva says, making a small mark on the parchment in front of her, and then looks up at the gathered teachers. “We need three more.”

“I’ll do it,” Severus says, before anyone else has even had time to react to the question. Embarrassing, this kind of eagerness. Longbottom smiles at him, with the chill of politeness, but still. He smiles, and Severus looks away as if burnt.

\--

And then:

“Severus!” Longbottom says, and Severus hears the metallic screech of a poorly tended bike slowing down behind him. When Longbottom shows up by his side, he’s leading the bike between them on the icy gravel path down to Hogsmeade, jogging a little to keep up.

Severus doesn’t like it when he calls him by his first name. Not that he sees it as inappropriate in some way because of who they are. Not that he is reminded of Longbottom’s school days, not that. This adult version of him seems like a different person, very far away from the student that would have called him sir. It’s the intrusion of it, the needy intimacy of the expectation for Severus to call him by his first name. Neville. He supposes he should. There’s no reason not to.

“Good morning,” Severus says, instead of making a decision about what to call him, and Longbottom smiles and pulls his scarf in tighter around his neck. Severus glances at the bike and waits for Longbottom to keep talking. He could have kept riding past him. This is a choice.

“Are you heading into the village?” Longbottom asks, his words coming out as clouds in front of him.

“Yes,” Severus says, and then, because he desperately does not want Longbottom to jump on his bike again, “You are as well, I take it?”

It is an uncomfortable conversation, which Severus wants both desperately to end and desperately to continue. Longbottom tells him he’s going in to Hogsmeade to ‘buy tea, ostensibly, but really I just wanted to get some air’. Severus tells him he’s going to pick up potions ingredients he ordered, from the small post office off the main road where their larger parcels sometimes end up, before it closes for the holidays.

“Are you excited for the dance then?” Longbottom asks, and makes a little face, as if he too is aware of how silly it seems to use a word like ‘excited’ to describe Severus.

“I’m sure the students will appreciate it,” he says, and then, maybe a little bit too familiar, “Are you nervous about chaperoning?”

Longbottom laughs. “Yeah, a little bit. You could tell?”

By now they’re walking through the main road, the buildings around them decked out in the gaudy Christmas lights that Severus has always hated. He dislikes Christmas, aware of how little of a surprise that is, and so doesn’t mention it. It makes him uneasy, the entirety of December. Tied to unpleasant family dinners, the expectation of something that no one in his family had the knowledge or capacity to give.

“You’re very popular with the student body,” Severus says. “I’m sure you’ll be just as popular even if you confiscate a bottle or two of Firewhiskey.”

“I’m not worried about popularity,” Longbottom counters, and then, “I’ll wait for you.”

He points to the door next to him, where they’ve stopped, the red door to the post office, with its little sign in the window, screaming OPEN at them.

Severus uneasily heads inside and gets his packages of dried leeches, fittingly disagreeable, and when he returns to the street, Longbottom is still standing there, waiting for him. He lifts his gaze from the sign in the window when Severus exits and starts to roll his bike in the direction of the shop down the street that sells candy and ink and tea.

“What are you worried about?” Severus asks, when Longbottom doesn’t offer to continue their conversation. He’s aware that he’s now walking the opposite way he needs to go to get back to the castle.

“What? Oh, uh… I don’t know, I’ve just never had this much responsibility for their wellbeing, I guess. I’m not head of house, like, uh…”

‘Like you’, he was going to say, but Severus isn’t head of house anymore, that role has been Slughorn’s since Severus became headmaster and Minerva didn’t think it wise to reinstate him. Severus is not fit to be responsible for anyone either.

“As far as debauchery goes, what they get up to tends to be quite mild. Some alcohol, some heavy petting,” Severus says matter of fact. “We can do a first round together and I’ll show you where they like to run off to.”

“That does make me feel better,” Longbottom laughs, and Severus frowns at the clear, joyful sound of it.

They make small talk for the rest of the walk, and Longbottom tells him it’s alright for him to head back when they get to the shop, so Severus does. He levitates the box of supplies in front of him without thinking, and ponders the conversation. So very like him, to be worried about the safety of the student body. Severus supposes that’s where his concern is as well, if he examines the core of the thing, although he knows by now that he’s not keeping them from harm, just embarrassment. The worst they’re going to do is say something stupid or snog the wrong person. Charming, nonetheless, Neville’s worry.

\--

He thinks about it again and again, after he has realised that that is the first full conversation they’ve had one on one that hasn’t ended in either of them upset. He adds the caveat, ‘since Longbottom came to teach’, but realises that that isn’t true. He probably has not had a conversation with Longbottom all throughout the man’s school years that didn’t end in Longbottom upset, or himself angry.

He wants to apologise for that too, deep in his bones, he wants to apologise for all of it, again and again until Longbottom tells him it’s alright. He knows he hasn’t officially accepted it. The apology. It takes work, he reminds himself. It takes patience. Severus is good with patience. The long game.

He sits at the teacher’s table and listens to Minerva give her speech, thanking them all for the semester and wishing the happy holidays, telling them, in her stern voice, that she is proud of their accomplishments.

Draco isn’t there, has already gone off to meet his girlfriend and slog through Christmas dinners at both their parents’. The students and those in the faculty that have families and homes to return to leave with the train late tomorrow afternoon. He wonders if Neville will leave for the holidays. He has family he can celebrate with, although he might opt for a shorter visit, since he’s settling in for his first year teaching here. Or he might also have a girlfriend to meet up with, some sweet and pretty future wife, a thought that Severus quickly dismisses. No, he would have heard of that. The school is nothing if not a ripe breeding ground for gossip, and something like that would travel quick. A student would have a crush and go digging, or ask him outright, and from there it would spread. Or Neville himself would say something in passing. No, Severus would know.

Maybe he is staying then. With heaps of both fear and excitement he decides to ask him, later, when they’re alone in the empty corridors and can talk.

Inside the Great Hall, the tables get cleared and pushed to the side and the decorations of glitter and holly hang down lower, casting a moody glow on the makeshift dance floor. It looks to Severus like a toddler’s birthday party, these giggly and eager groups of children standing in packs and waiting for the music to start, but he can see how to someone else it might look charming, might be connected to wonderful memories of all those teenaged experiences he never liked or never really indulged in. Everyone below the fifth years can only stay until ten o’clock, when it’s Severus’ and Neville’s job to ring a little bell and get them off to bed, something Severus is not looking forward to. They are of course not the only chaperones, and maybe he can convince someone else to do it. Reasonably it would be the responsibility of the heads of house, but Severus has a hard time seeing, for example, Slughorn, do any work at all.

And then, the rest of them can stay until midnight, someone has decided. Now, music flows from somewhere in the rafters, but later members of the school choir and band have a ‘setlist’, something the committee of pupils decided on months ago, along with the decorations and the snacks and the punch, which Severus is sure will end up half full of vodka by the end of the night. That he has chosen to work as, or ended up as, a teacher of all things, has never seemed like a worse outcome for him. Why is he here? Surrounded by youth and awkwardness and that teenaged nervousness he hates so much. There something particular about it, that insecurity and moldability that is so vile. Vulnerability, he supposes.

“When do I start worrying about someone spiking the punch?” Neville asks, as if he can read Severus’ mind, a horrible thought. Severus clears his throat and watches as Neville, in a way that’s charmingly just a little over the top, peers out at the crowd, as if he’s keeping an eye on a group of prisoners.

“Spiking it with alcohol? After the younger students have gone to bed, I’d say,” Severus answers, and then glances up at the ceiling where Peeves is idly floating, stopping to tug at some of the decorations once in a while. “Peeves might try something less appetizing earlier than that though.”

“Oh, god, I didn’t even think of that,” Neville mumbles, with a groan at the end of his sentence, small and pleasing noise.

They stand there, at the side of the room, a close eye on the punch bowl, in a comfortable silence. One or two groups of students come up to Neville, talk about the class work, or give him a jab about needing to loosen up and then join the dancing and the laughter in the middle of the room. Severus remembers the Yule Ball during the Triwizard Tournament. This is nothing like that, none of the pompous pretend elegance, and the dresses and robes are nowhere near as elaborate or expensive. But the matter of ‘dates’, Severus does remember from back then. Who is going with who, who hasn’t been invited by anyone and therefore isn’t going at all, who is going stag. There are couples, now, that dance awkwardly to the reasonably slow song, or sway with the music while holding hands and talking to their classmates. Severus has never understood that, he thinks, the will to couple up, to belong to someone to the degree that they have to touch them like that, all the time. It strikes him as weak in that utterly teenager way, to want to confirm another’s emotions, flaunt it like that.

A few of the seventh year students want Neville to dance with them, tries to goad him to ‘show off his moves’, but Neville declines, laughing, until Minerva swoops past and they’re distracted by another authority figure to tease. Flattered and amused, he turns to Severus.

“This feels like it’s going well, right?” he asks, and Severus nods, absentmindedly picking at one of the hors d’oeuvres left out to get lukewarm on the buffet table next to them. “Did you want to do a round around the first floor, maybe?”

The suggestion has good timing, if they leave now then they will be mysteriously missing by the time the younger kids need escorting back to their dorms. “Yes,” he answers and Longbottom puts his drink down.

They start in the alcoves in the corridors and by the stairs, and then head to the courtyard, the bushes and the doorways. They find some seventh and sixth years smoking cigarettes, but nothing more serious than that.

“And there are the upper floors of course, but,” Severus explains, “24 hour surveillance is not a clause of our contract. Not mine anyway.”

“Right,” Neville says, smiling at his feet as they make their way back to the Great Hall, walking across the courtyard and into the light spilling from the high arched windows. Dimly they can hear the sound from the dance, the slow thumping of the music and the loud, excited noise of someone laughing.

“I wanted to say thank you,” Neville murmurs, when they move under the arches supporting the castle walls. “For helping with the… for talking about the war and, and uh, Voldemort. I meant it when I said you handled it well.”

Severus is surprised and flattered, he is not immune to flattery. He is quiet for a long time, maybe too long, and then changes the subject. “Did you speak to Hitchens?”

“I did. Yeah, I did,” Neville nods, sucking in his lip between his teeth to think. Spending time with him like this, in the half dark, in the night, in the cold, it’s different than the other day in the village. There are no fellow shoppers here, just the odd group of students on their way back from the bathrooms, far away, and even that they can barely hear. No noise carries over the snow covered stones, and they seem all alone out here, the only people in the world. “He’s a work in progress, I think.”

“Oh? Are you prepared to put in the time for a ‘work in progress’?” he asks, not wanting to sound snide and condescending, but not being able to stop himself.

Neville ignores him. “I didn’t think about the fact that you weren’t there for the final, you know, fight. You didn’t see him die.”

“I read about it in the newspaper,” Severus says. “Like everyone else.”

“How long were you in St Mungo’s?” Neville asks, a seemingly unconnected question, but of course it isn’t. Severus meets his grey eyes again, sombre, again. They’ve stopped outside the large doors to the corridor leading into the hallway to the Great Hall. Half of Severus’ face is ice cold, the other half is hit by the warm air from the castle’s corridors.

He doesn’t want to talk about the war, or the hospital. He wants to ask Neville whether he’s staying at the school over the holidays. Whether Severus is going to see him in the halls, whether he can casually ask him to share some lunch with him. Or dinner, maybe. He likes the thought of the two of them having dinner. Friends. He bets that Neville can cook. Bake, even. Something wholesome and filling, like sourdough bread or maybe the seasonally appropriate plum pudding. “Three months,” he says, instead of any of that, and Neville nods. “Thankfully I missed most of the trials.”

Neville makes a small noise in the back of his throat to agree. “Does it hurt, still? Your throat?” When Severus doesn’t answer straight away, he hurries out a, “It’s a personal question, you don’t have to answer.”

“Some days,” Severus says calmly. “I was lucky that Granger knew what she was doing. And the healers, as well. I’ve been very lucky. I’m grateful.”

That’s the truth of it. He has been lucky, all these things converging to fight for him to stay alive. The cut to his throat not going very deep and the coagulating effects of the snake venom, Granger knowing what to do and having the correct potion with her.

“Grateful to you, as well, apparently. I read about you killing Nagini,” Severus says, pondering the thought out loud. “The nearly chosen one, hm? Living up to your almost-fate.”

“Always a bridesmaid, never a bride, I guess,” Neville says with a smile. A personal joke, for himself only, but the thought of it, or how he says it, makes Severus smile, cough out a laugh. Neville stares at him, first startled and then raising his eyebrows in surprise and delight. He raises a hand to brush his hair behind his ear in a bashful gesture, and looks away, into the castle.

“We should get back inside. It’s almost time to help with the, what did you call it?”

“Herding,” Severus answers and Neville laughs again.

“Yeah, herding,” he repeats, and then, in a slightly lower voice, as they head in, walking shoulder to shoulder. “You’re staying here over the holidays, right?”

Severus presses his lips together, grateful that Neville can’t see his face in the dim light. “Yes, I’m staying.”

He doesn’t say anything else, but waits for Neville to volunteer the information himself, which he does. “Me too. I’m having some friends over on Christmas Day. You should come.”

A succinct and clear invitation, but not what he wanted. He wants to talk to Neville alone, discuss the students and how the healing properties of dittany differs depending on time of harvest and ask him how the fanged geranium is doing. He wants to tell Neville details about his own life that Neville will then remember, like he does with Draco. He wants to be seen, maybe.

“What friends would that be?” he asks, and Neville shrugs.

“It’s not going to be a big thing, just some lunch, maybe,” he says and then begins a jumbled account of who he has invited and who might come and who can’t come, exactly like Severus remembers friendships in his twenties. “Uh… I invited Draco, but I heard he was spending the holidays with Astoria. Hagrid is away, of course, on that thing. McGonagall said she would stop by but she didn’t sound very excited. Luna is coming, her father is in Italy trying to find Heliopaths, I think, so she’s alone for the holidays. I think Ginny and Harry might stop by, after their family lunch, and that probably means Hermione and Ron as well.”

Is he willing to stand small talk with the Weasleys and Weasley adjacent, just to perhaps talk to Neville for a few minutes?

“What time?”

Neville smiles at him, and Severus realises he is willing, with a disappointed sigh.

\--

“No big thing,” he had reiterated, again and again, “You don’t have to bring anything.”

Severus arrives with a bottle of wine, which he hands to Neville with the words, “A late house warming gift,” and waves away the thanks Neville offers him. Neville, in the middle of a seemingly quite intense cooking crisis, points him to a seat and then disappears back to the kitchen.

It is like Draco described, full of plants. In the windows, in the bookcases, hanging from the ceilings. Severus sits in an armchair by the fire in the larger room that seems to be used as both a living room, study and dining room, and tries to absorb his surroundings. Since his rooms are next to the greenhouses, the place has a tinge of the same feel, large windows and plenty of light. It is messy, in a lived in, pleasant way that Severus connects to young people, making it difficult to focus the eye. Papers strewn everywhere, clutter lining the bookshelves, which are also chock full of all kinds of books, pressed in and stacked in all kinds of ways. Thankfully a minimal amount of Christmas ornaments, he can’t quite imagine what it would look like in garish reds and greens atop the mess and clutter. It smells like earth and thyme, whatever Neville is busy with in the kitchen, and then the indescribable smell of Neville himself, stretching out here unimpeded.

Severus isn’t the first to arrive. Luna Lovegood, in her strange, lofty way, floats out from where Severus assumes the bathroom or bedroom is, and looks at him with her large, clear eyes.

“Hello,” she says, neither surprised nor pleased.

“Hello,” he greets her back cautiously, and feels slightly like he’s talking to some wild animal, a stray cat.

“Merry Christmas, also,” she says, and he notices now that she’s wearing an oversized Christmas sweater as a dress. He can’t tell what the glittery, red and green pattern on it is supposed to be, but if he were to guess he would say a deer, in the middle of jumping or rearing its front hooves. “How are you, sir?”

The politeness takes him aback. The others, Potter and his friends, don’t talk to him like he’s a figure of authority anymore, but of course, Luna Lovegood is not a part of those dinners Potter and his wife have. Traveling, is what he has gathered she does, writing articles, maybe. He is dimly aware of her father’s newspaper, not something he reads himself, but he remembers the trouble he caused for Voldemort during the war.

“Fine,” he says, and then as an afterthought, “Please don’t call me sir.”

She smiles tentatively and nods, her large and brightly coloured earrings wobbling as she moves. She disappears into the kitchen and Severus can hear muffled talking, and then she comes out with two glasses of wine, red, the wine that Severus brought. She hands one to him and holds the other one between two thin and bony hands.

“He’s got the situation under control,” she says, in a tone that seems to imply the exact opposite, and then sits down on the sofa opposite Severus, balancing her wine glass and folding her legs in under herself.

Severus sits there, in silence, willing himself not to chug the entire glass in one go. He hates this, the awkward small talk or the awkward lack thereof. He isn’t built for it. Lovegood, on the other hand, seems perfectly content to extend the silence even longer, to gaze at him or out at the room, or out through the windows to the greenhouses below.

He can’t take it. “Neville said you were traveling,” he says, immediately regretting the use of Longbottom’s first name. It sounds strange, tastes strange, coming from him. If she notices the small flare up of panic, she doesn’t noticeably react.

“Yes,” she says, and then elaborates a little bit. Poltergeists in Borneo, writing for her father’s newspaper, some collaboration with local authorities.

“Where do you live, then, when you’re not… working?”

“I’m mostly working,” she says, politely. “I’m mostly on the road. If I’m in Britain and I need a place to stay I’ll come here, or to my dad’s. He lives in Devon, near Ottery St Catchpole.”

“What about Rolf’s apartment?” Neville prods, sticking his head out from the kitchen and then entering, preoccupied with wiping his hands off on the dark green apron he’s wearing. “She’s dating mystery man Rolf Scamander,” he explains to Severus, and then sits down next to Luna in the sofa. Severus feels suddenly as if he’s at a job interview, or worse, as if he’s sitting opposite two parents, as if he’s the rambunctious teenager son.

“He’s not so mysterious,” she says, smiling at her hands. “Yeah, I guess I spend some time there too, when I’m in Britain.”

“And then you mysteriously end up bumping into each other in Italy, hm?” he murmurs, an inside joke that Severus can’t quite understand the details of. “And in Borneo? And in-“

She pushes her hair behind her ears bashfully, the dangly earrings clanking as she moves, and with a tug on Neville’s sleeve, she stops him talking.

“Sorry, I’ll stop teasing.”

“What about you, Severus? Where do you live when not at Hogwarts?” she turns to him and asks, and Severus is grateful to have something to talk about that isn’t someone else’s love life. He tells them about the house, the limited renovations he has slowly undertaken, the neighbourhood, the charms he has put on them. It’s a good subject, boring but passable.

After that, they eat, the three of them, and then Minerva, despite Neville’s hesitation, shows up for coffee, and then the Weasley clan and their spouses. The place is cramped, but Severus is pleased at the added number of people, it makes it acceptable that he sits in silence. He is also pleased that Minerva stays for the remainder of the afternoon, so he isn’t the oldest one present. The Potters have left their son (whose name he always carefully avoids having to say) with Molly Weasley, and seem to be in good spirits, although tired.

When he tells Draco about it afterwards, when they walk through the courtyard after New Year’s, he describes it as pleasant. The food had been good, despite the panic radiating from the kitchen and from Neville himself. Roasted vegetables and potatoes, some sort of vegetarian loaf for Lovegood’s sake. He is an enthusiastic and adventurous chef but not, as Severus had expected, a very good one.

Draco asks if she seemed to be doing well, and Severus, fully aware of what Draco is asking, says she seemed to be doing great. Draco answers him with a hesitant nod, and Severus recognises the guilt from his own anxious nightmares. Draco has mentioned before that they have exchanged letters, him and Lovegood, about the time she spent as a captive in the Malfoy’s mansion. He knows she is part of why he hates going back to the house, dislikes speaking to his parents.

He wants, not for the first time, to be able to take that pain away from him, to shoulder it himself on Draco’s behalf, and he recognises that ache that seems so much like parental worry.

“I’m fine,” Draco says, perceptive as always, and then changes the subject to Neville’s interior decorating. They both have a fascination with the clutter, and the plants, and the books. “And I mean, I guess that he cleaned up before having guests in your case. Did he show you the poison ivy?”

He had, proudly, shown off the enormous pot full of poison ivy that has taken over his entire kitchen, spreading its vines across the kitchen cupboards and counters as if it wanted to singlehandedly bring the wilderness inside.

“Sometimes in the mornings she’s stretched all the way into the sink,” he’d said, as if it is something to be fascinated by and not something worrying. It isn’t the most menacing thing he has seen Neville handle, but magical plants are unpredictable and it does literally has poison in its name.

“He has made it very… cosy,” Severus says, something that can be interpreted as an insult, but isn’t really. Draco’s rooms are smaller, and furnished with odd bits and pieces that he has found around the school, the largest pieces being the bed and the desk. It looks, all in all, like a fashionable loft somewhere else, London maybe, that has been transported here, all clean wood and minimalist decorating. He knows what Severus means, when he says cosy, something neither of them have been able to achieve or even willing to aim for, but that seems to come easy to Neville.

Severus doesn’t say this to Neville of course, doesn’t describe the way he’s both impressed and confused, not after the Christmas and not on Christmas day, not even when Neville and Luna are half sitting, half lying on the sofa, slightly drunk, listing reasons why they should sleep in the morning after. Not even then does he say something about gratitude or comfort, when the others have left and it’s just the three of them, so close to being the two of them. He says goodbye, and Neville waves to him from the sofa when he leaves, a small flick of his wrist and a smile that seems to convey that he understands.

\--

He is invited again, for lunch and dinner. Him and Draco coming over to Neville’s to eat some new charming monstrosity of butter and vegetables and herbs that Neville has concocted, squeezed in his little kitchen with the enormous pot of ivy. One or two times Draco brings food instead, but they eat at Neville’s always, Draco’s rooms being too small and Severus being too private of a person to let someone in his space, even the two of them.

They are lovely evenings. Sitting around the fire drinking wine or whiskey and talking about class work, or anything, really. The war, sometimes. Or sometimes that all their friends are having children, or Neville’s brief time as an Auror, or Draco’s parents, one memorable evening after he’d had what seemed to be a horrible conversation with them about how he had proposed to Astoria. One evening, Astoria joins them. Severus likes her, she is humble and shy, but very firm about her boundaries and beliefs. He can see why the Malfoys don’t particularly like her and why Draco is so very in love with her.

And then, one evening, Severus gets Neville all to himself, gets to bask in all of that attention and laughter and warmth, all on his own. It starts with the match between Gryffindor and Hufflepuff, something the school has been buzzing about for weeks. Severus doesn’t pay all that much attention to gossip, he claims, but nevertheless even he knows about the drama that is going to unfold. Apparently the Seeker for Gryffindor and the Chaser for Hufflepuff have gone through a bad breakup that has divided the school, and this is the culmination of months of passive aggression between the players, and their loyal teams. Double bookings of the fields, ‘pranks’ that have gone overboard, and last but not least what Severus has heard was a very embarrassing public reading of love poetry one of the players wrote to the other one several months ago. It is driving Rolanda crazy and entertaining everyone else not directly involved or responsible.

“Who are you betting on then?” Neville asks, from his seat below Severus, twisted around in his seat so he can talk to him and to Slughorn, who annoyingly always hovers close to Severus during the matches, so he can, as he puts it “commiserate and celebrate with a fellow Slytherin”. This annoys both Severus (who dislikes Slughorn) and Neville (who says that attitude is detrimental to the interhouse solidarity they’re trying to achieve, but who may also simply dislike Slughorn).

“Gryffindor, I’m sad to say,” Slughorn says and Severus has to bite his tongue to keep from laughing at Neville’s poor attempt at avoiding rolling his eyes.

“If anyone is taking bets, I’d say Hufflepuff,” Severus says, and Neville huffs.

“Are you sure?” he says, and continues, “I’m not going to reveal my sources, but I’ve heard that this may be the best team since Harry Potter’s days.”

He says it with a glint in his eyes, they’ve laughed about this earlier, how Slughorn loves to talk about Harry Potter as if neither of them know him, and yes, of course, he has set him off. He spends the first half of the game listening to Slughorn drone on about teaching the great Harry Potter, as if Severus hasn’t done exactly the same himself, as if he’s not in the presence of a man that destroyed a Horcrux, and then the second half in tense anticipation of the inevitable loss of the Hufflepuff team.

The game ends after way too long, when the Gryffindor seeker catches the Snitch, which causes the Hufflepuff Chaser to promptly land his broom and storm off in a huff, followed shortly by one or two of his team mates. The commentator, a cheerful Slytherin, does not miss a chance to dig in on this juicy gossip.

“I wish they’d leave them alone,” Neville comments on their walk back to the castle. “Being in love at that age is hard enough without the entire school having to know every detail.”

“’Being in love’,” Severus repeats dismissively, and doesn’t say anything else, lets Neville keep talking about how maybe he can sneak the suggestion of not handing out house points into the agenda for next staff meeting, something they both know would probably help his plan, but that they both also know would never happen.

They continue this conversation throughout dinner in the Great Hall, shifting subjects to talking in slightly hushed tones about Slughorn’s horrendous Slytherin green hat, and Minerva muttering swear words under her breath during the game. As well as who they think will win the Cup, and whether or not it actually is the best team since Harry Potter’s days as a Seeker.

And then, “So I know we didn’t have a formal bet, but I do feel like you owe me a drink.”

“Betting and alcohol both sound like they would be covered by Hogwarts ground rules,” Severus says, as a joke, before he can stop himself. It’s an excuse to spend time with him, he knows that. He wants to spend time with him.

Neville makes a noise as if he agrees but doesn’t care, and Severus caves so easily.

“Fine, then,” he says. “I have some Firewhiskey lying around.”

“Your place this time?” Neville asks, and before Severus’s brain can think to argue he has offered another suggestion.

\--

He goes off to find the Firewhiskey and meets Neville back in the Great Hall, too late in the evening to have to hide the bottle from the students. And then they walk, heading up to the tower next to the library, Neville following excitedly behind him.

“Where are we going?” he asks, more than once, and Severus just tells him not to worry. When they get to the tower and Severus opens up the cleaning closet and jimmies open the window, he is not worried, but he is excitedly unsure of where he’s taking him.

“Follow me,” Severus says, and then awkwardly steps out on the ledge beyond the window and to the left. He waits for Neville to watch him and then heaves himself up on the roof next to the window, ashamed of how proud he is to be able to make the climb up here without groaning like an old man. And then, a few steps later, they’ve arrived.

“I must admit that the climb was a lot easier at seventeen,” Severus mumbles, and looks around the roof. This part is surrounded on one side by the windowless wall that on the other side houses the library and on the other side the tower closest to the library, stretching up tall above them. In the middle a small square is created, big enough for two or three people to sit, and with a view of the lake and the forest on one side and the rest of the castle’s roofs on the other side.

“Oh, wow,” Neville says and gestures to the view of the slightly snowy hills below them. “How did you find this place? When?”

“It’s good for not running into people,” he says, not an answer at all.

“I know you’re a private person, but dragging me up to the roof to avoid me seeing your interior decorating skills is a little much,” he says, and then adds, when Severus doesn’t laugh, “I’m kidding. This is very nice.”

He plops down on the stone unceremoniously and brings out, seemingly from nowhere, two cups, while Severus watches and wonders if someone else has been up here in the twenty years since he last was here. “Wait,” he says, and holds out the bottle for Neville to take it.

He steps over to the wall and remembers, clear as day, which stone it is he needs to press. He brings out his wand and does so, and the stone comes lose into his hands, so he can take the notebook hidden behind it.

He holds it in his hand and then, in a gesture he doesn’t mean to be so vulnerable, but that feels vulnerable, he gives it to Neville without opening it.

“What is this?” he asks, amused and fascinated, as he flips through the pages full of messy scribbles.

“Ideas for spells, probably. Perhaps some love poems, if you squint. On the subject of teenage love.” He finishes the sentence in a murmur. He means it to be funny but his voice dies out as he watches Neville read in the half dark.

“Oh, these are good,” he mumbles into the open book, and then looks up at him, “I don’t mean love poems, I haven’t found any of those yet. But the spells. This is good work. How old were you when you did these?”

“Sixteen, seventeen, probably,” he says, feeling unexpectedly self-conscious.

“You were very good,” he says again, and when Severus sits down he is so absorbed in reading that he has to lean behind him to grab his glass of whiskey. The drink burns his throat going down, settling in his stomach with a familiar warmth.

He leans back on his hands behind him and watches the trees below them, the birds swooping in and out of the branches, as Neville reads.

“What’s this one?” He hands the book over to Severus, and they lean over it together, Neville’s wand lighting up the page.

“Scrambling text, I think,” Severus says, squinting. “Mm, this is from fifth year. A girl in Arithmancy class kept copying my test answers.”

Neville laughs at that, and lets Severus keep the book in his lap. After a while he flicks his wrist and the light from his wand floats to settle to the right of them. When Severus looks up he has his eyes closed against the wind, face relaxed. From this short distance Severus can see every line on his face, the light eyelashes, the slight red of his cheeks and the soft shape of his lower lip, his firm jaw.

“Thanks,” he says, finally, and Severus looks away before he can open his eyes. “For showing me this. It’s nice. I can imagine you up here, writing notes.”

“Hm,” Severus answers, and holds his cup out for a refill. 

“Is there actually poetry in there?” Neville gestures to the notebook Severus is still letting rest in his lap.

Severus hesitates for a second and then says, “Yes, there is.”

Neville laughs again, a charmed chuckle, and follows up with, “Can I read some of it? Please.”

Severus sighs, and opens the book again, flipping through it to find the page he wants. “There,” he says, and hands it back without looking. He recognises the page without having to read it.

“So dramatic,” Neville mumbles, smiling. “Who is this for?”

He can tell that Neville knows without having to ask, but he appreciates the question anyway. The crux of his freedom being dependent on Potter’s testimony is that now of course everyone knows about Lily. He has read those headlines too, after he woke up in St Mungo’s, and after the trial. Unrequited love, all of that, which of course helped him avoid time in Azkaban, but which also is embarrassing and simplifying, and not good enough for her, or the memory of her.

“Lily,” he says, the first time in a long time he has said her name out loud. “Very dramatic, yes.”

“Do you still…” he asks and trails off, scrunching his face up at the intrusiveness of the question, something that makes his face seem even younger. “I’m sorry, that’s nosy.”

Severus takes the book back and this time he does look, for a brief moment, at the dark and intense letters, the blotches of ink. “It’s fine,” he says, and enjoys being listened to, having all that attention on him. He explains Lily, or tries to. What she meant and what he fell in love with. How kind she was, how beautiful, how funny and sarcastic she could be, how talented and competent. And then what she meant to him. Freedom. He was an odd child, but Lily always saw _him_ , not the awkward, ugly little thing he was. With her, he could have been someone else. And he tells him how he knows now that what he fell in love with was the idea of her, the selfish idea of what kind of man he could be if only. And that way it could be her fault, that he acted the way he did, because she didn’t want him.

“It was unfair to her,” he says. Neville doesn’t say anything, doesn’t offer condolences or misplaced pity or undeserved forgiveness on behalf of her. He does, however, place his hand in between Severus’ shoulder blades, one warm hand that stays there for just a few seconds. It feels like solidarity more than it feels like pity, empathy more than sympathy.

Neville tells him about his parents, about spending his childhood in the hospital, about the empty hole where they should be, the puzzle that he is trying to fit together of who they were and who they are now, with pieces that he can never seem to fit together correctly. “Not that it’s the same thing,” he says, more serious than he has ever seen him. “I just… I don’t know, we’re not alone in loss, especially right now, but…”

“I know what you mean,” Severus says, and desperately wants to offer him the same sort of warmth that spreads down his spine, even now, but Neville moves to refill Severus’ cup before his brain can scramble up something more concrete.

He gets up to put the book back in the wall and seal it up again, and when he turns around Neville has stretched out on the stone floor, eyes closed. “I just realised that maybe getting a little bit tipsy and climbing up on the roof was a bad idea. How are we gonna get down?”

“It’s not that far,” Severus says. Being included in a we with Neville feels better than it should.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a coward,” Neville goes, his eyes on the dark sky above them. “I’m very good with heights. My great uncle once threw me out a window.”

“Why?” Severus asks, when he has registered the last part.

“I don’t think he meant to do it, it was more a case of him losing his grip on me. But he wanted to see if I was a squib, I guess. You’d think I’d earned my unbelievable bravery and guts from the whole war hero thing, but I actually think it was seeing the ground come at me like that when he tossed me over the window ledge. But still though, maybe we should have thought twice about this.”

He turns to Severus to show that he’s smiling, that this is a joke they’re both in on, and it is painfully sweet to know that they share something, even as small as a joke.

\--

In the months leading up to summer, Severus learns about Neville’s quirks and habits. He spends on average three evenings or afternoons a week in his quarters. Severus has counted, has added it up, as if keeping track of the days would make this less sappy and strange. As if adding math to the equation would somehow make his choices logical.

Neville likes to put music on when he cooks, which he mumbles the lyrics to as if he can’t stop himself. He has a wide selection of records and muggle CDs that he chooses from deliberately as they wait for water to boil, or the oven to heat up. It can be anything, rarely indicative of his mood. Slow piano tunes or pop music that Severus recognises from muggle radio, other things that were popular before Severus was born, moody voices that crackle out from the record player. In English, in Spanish, in French. (Severus favourites are the ones where he can understand the lyrics, where the guitar or piano itself is soft and breakable and the lyrics are angry and bitter.)

He cannot for the life of him follow a recipe. Severus has watched with horror as he ‘approximates’ ingredients, and knows for a fact that he doesn’t even own a measuring cup. The only thing he is particular about it sugar in his tea, four spoons and a dash of milk, to make a sickening sugary slurry. He claims, despite Severus arguing the sugar would give him at least as much energy, that he can’t drink coffee after seven pm, so when they meet after dinner, on weekdays, he drinks tea and makes coffee for Severus, anyway.

He has a favourite cup, the one he drinks tea or coffee out of most days. It is tall and pink and has a gold plated brim, which he has watched Neville press to his lips so many times now it might be in the hundreds.

He wears sweaters when it’s cold, big, fluffy things he has been gifted. Most of his things are gifts, and despite the fact that Severus knows his grandmother is relatively wealthy, he doesn’t like to buy things. He buys gifts, he receives gifts, which is foreign to Severus. The record player is an heirloom, the pots and pans were in the kitchen when he moved in, the furniture his relatives gave him. He learns a lot about Neville’s relatives, a tangled mess of old aunts and uncles and great aunts, great uncles, cousins.

The few things he has actually bought have sentimental value. He owns records and CDs, his plants of course. Cheap novelty cups that Lovegood sends to him regularly, every time she sets foot in a new country (he shows him one from her short stay in Sweden doing research on the mating habits of Snorkacks, a blue cup with yellow moose). Things of high quality are mostly reserved for Herbology, a plethora of gardening tools and gloves, in all colours, of all materials, based on what plant he is working on. Some clothes. He dresses well, in modest and well-fitting sweaters or shirts, green or brown or sometimes (Severus’ favourite) a rich gold.

He owns a polaroid camera that prints magical, moving pictures straight from it, without the need for a long and arduous process in a darkroom. Severus doesn’t see it often (“the film is expensive, so I don’t use it too often”), but when he does bring it out it’s to take pictures of the most mundane, everyday things. The sky, if they’re on a walk in the afternoon, or if they’re sitting on the roof, or a bird (“oh my god, look at the plumage”). Several times it’s plants, the sludgy green of the algae floating on top of the lake or the bright reds and yellows and oranges of the tulips Hagrid is growing. Or his friends, when he invites them over for dinner and they drink and laugh and the candlelight is warm and dim.

Or Severus, once. Severus borrows a sweater from him, a Gryffindor red, fluffy turtleneck that hangs off Severus’ frame, is too big even on Neville. It goes like this, dreamlike: a sudden May rainfall catches them off guard, Neville was only going to show him the mushrooms he found by the gates, as the oven got hot, and then suddenly, both of them wet, running in the mud back to the castle. (“No, come on, take this, it’s fine, you don’t need to walk all the way down to the dungeons to change, dinner is almost ready, it’s fine.”) He hands the sweater to him and Severus changes into it in Neville’s bedroom, high windows up toward the ceiling, music gently soaring from the kitchen. His footprints everywhere, the unmade bed, the half-finished glass of water on the nightstand, the clothes hamper, the smell of the sweater he is now enveloped in, he is now enveloped in him, and he thinks, oh. Oh, right. He knows this feeling.

He studies himself in the mirror mounted on the outside of Neville’s closet, the knitted sweater eating him. Like the banners in the Great Hall, the colour of blood, love, or something like it.

“Oh, wow,” he hears from the door, interrupting his introspection. He hadn’t even noticed the volume of the music being lowered.

“I look like a bird,” Severus says. He does, a puffy round shape with two sticks sticking out from the bottom, his hair wet and dripping, glued to his head. The beak, self-explanatory.

“No, you don’t,” Neville says, but he’s laughing, trying to suppress a wide and happy smile.

“I do,” he says, pushing his awkwardness away to instead be consumed by this amused delight.

“Maybe, but I love it. Can I take a picture?”

He walks past Severus to fetch his camera, stood on the windowsill in the bedroom, and in the small space, they stand together, Neville waiting for an answer.

“Please? Red looks good on you,” he says, smiling, meaning for it to be jab towards Severus and his all black wardrobe, or the Gryffindor pride of it, or Slughorn for thinking house pride is important, but all Severus hears is that Neville thinks he looks good. “I won’t show it to anyone, I promise.”

“Fine,” he acquiesces and stands awkwardly, not knowing what to do with his hands.

“Smile,” Neville commands, and instead Severus glares at him. “No, smile.”

“At what?” he asks, and Neville lowers the camera.

“The thought of Slughorn seeing you in that at the next Quidditch game,” he says, and when the corners of Severus’ mouth curl upwards against his wishes, he raises the camera quickly and takes the picture.

Severus keeps the sweater, wears it throughout their dinner, and then wears it back to his rooms, where he lays it out on the bed, ceremoniously, looks at it, the red against the black of his sheets. Touches the sleeves and the neckline, feels the fabric between two fingers, and sits down next to it, contemplating.

\--

He doesn’t see the picture until weeks later, at one of Neville’s larger dinner parties, trying to retreat back to the bedroom again, to avoid Granger talking about policy changes at the Ministry, the Potters talking heatedly about Quidditch as they take turns wrangling their toddler, Lovegood explaining her latest article to Neville who is desperately trying to keep something from boiling over. As usual Draco isn’t here because Lovegood is here, because he can’t stand to be in the same room as her, and there is no one for Severus to cling to, sit in silence with.

And there it is, in the small hallway leading from the living room to the bathroom and bedroom. A series of polaroids, in a rainbow of muted colours. A view of the lake in the early morning, all light blues, a candid photo of Lovegood looking towards something behind the camera, serious and thoughtful, several pictures inside the different greenhouses, the rain against the glass. Several snapshots of crowds, of his friends with their arms around each other, laughing at something. And then Severus, by the middle right of the cluster of pictures.

A portrait, from his torso and upwards, the red of the shirt the only thing with colour in the picture. He moves, turning towards the camera, pushing his wet hair out of his eyes, and then he smiles, a tiny quirk of his lips upward. He does look good. Happy.

Transfixed by it, he brings his hand up without thinking to touch it with careful fingertips, this image of him he’s never seen, this version of him that is so foreign.

He likes the person in that picture, which catches him by surprise, a chaotic, panicked surprise.

“Severus?” he hears from down the hall and with a quick, spooked movement he drops his fingers to his side, turning to see Neville’s head. He walks closer and says, in a lower, stressed tone, “I said I’d show Hermione and Harry how the repairs we did on the west wall turned out and, uh, you know, what, it’s not really important, but could you maybe keep an eye on the food? More like, keep an eye on Luna while she ‘keeps an eye’ on the food?”

And then, when he sees where Severus has stopped, what he’s looking at. “Oh, you found it.” He sounds nervous, like he’s been caught at something. “I said I wouldn’t show it off, but I thought it would… It, uh…” he trails off self-consciously, like he is embarrassed.

“It’s fine,” Severus says, and then, his fingertips still feeling like they’re burning, he brushes past Neville to head to the kitchen.

For the following twenty minutes he stares into the stew Neville is making, stirring once in a while, as Luna asks him questions on dark magic creatures that he tries to answer. “No, maybe you’re more interested in the spells and such,” she says, and Severus wonders for a brief moment if Neville has talked to her about the book of spell notes he showed him, and even worse, the poetry. He feels raw and exposed, like a tree with its bark peeled off. He trusts Neville, but this is difficult. He supposes this comes with having a social life where he’s trying not to lie, having to tell the truth all the time, to all these people. He can hear the Weasley siblings arguing lightly about something at the table in the living room, and the boy, making those wet, soggy noises that babies make.

And then, the rest of them are back, and Severus hovers in the background of the kitchen, and then back in the living room, and then back in the kitchen. If he keeps moving, maybe no one will speak to him, maybe they won’t drag him into another inevitable conversation on children. As a man who doesn’t have any children and can’t even imagine himself in that position, this obsession on the subject is jarring. Weasley is pregnant, again, and so is Granger, and usually, if he is at his best, he can say that they have deserved talking about it by how much of a hellish ordeal pregnancy seems to be, but today, he is tired and no, not at his best. He stays quiet, his favourite of the new skills he has learnt.

Neville talks to him. Neville stays with him in the kitchen, and seems as tired of the baby talk as Severus is, and together they cut up lettuce and cucumbers and pieces of bread. It’s nice. He could do this forever.

“I always get so nervous about cursing when they bring James over,” he murmurs, so that only Severus can hear.

“He’s barely a year old, he doesn’t know what curse words are.”

“I know, that’s what Ginny tells me, and she swears like a sailor, I know, I’m just like… What if he suddenly starts-“

“Hey, Neville, someone’s knocking at the door, should we answer it?” Granger yells from the other room, loud enough to be heard over the muted conversations.

“Um, sure! It might be Hagrid, I told him you were coming over,” he says, and someone says something and then there’s laughter.

“What if it’s a student, Professor?” someone, maybe Potter, says, and they laugh, again, the happy and untroubled laughter of light teasing.

It isn’t a student. It isn’t Hagrid. They hear the muttered words from the kitchen, “Is Neville here, or did I get the wrong door somehow?” and then Severus sees Neville drop the knife on the cutting board, look up at him with raised eyebrows.

He goes, “Oh… Oh, I… I’ll just be, uh-“ and he gestures slightly to the other room, bread crumbs still on his hands, and he shakes his head, as if shaking off an idea, a thought, and he turns and walks out into the living room.

Severus follows him, at a distance, and there’s a man there, that he doesn’t recognise. Severus stays by the door to the kitchen and watches as the man spots Neville and lights up, a wide smile and then holds his arms out. He can tell, before Neville makes his way over there, ducking under the hanging plants and zigzagging to avoid the couch, that they’re going to kiss. Something in the way he holds his arm out, something in the way he leans in.

Severus watches them, feeling nothing but his quickening pulse. The man is older than Neville, closer to his own age, and taller than Severus. Light hair with speckles of grey, so maybe older than Severus even. He reminds Severus of someone, or something.

“I didn’t know you were coming,” Neville says, as he pulls away, the man’s arm still on his back.

“I thought I’d surprise you.” He speaks with an accent, French maybe, German? Some cultured European language that Severus can’t quite pin down. “Hello, everyone,” he says to the room, that has quieted. They’re facing away from him, so Severus can’t see their faces, but he can imagine. Friendly. Smiling. He tries to fix his own face to as close to a welcoming expression as he can muster, but he doesn’t know how well he’s doing.

“Oh, uh, right,” Neville says, seems to be caught off guard. Is it a pleasant surprise? Is this man welcome? Can he touch him like that? He turns to the room, and does the introductions, and the man shakes hands and exchanges pleasantries, rubs the head of James Potter, ruffling his hair, as if he’s in a 50s TV commercial, as if he’s a king greeting his subjects. The boy’s mother also doesn’t seem to think it’s a normal thing to do, and huffs out a surprised laugh at this and offers her own hand up instead. He shakes Severus’ hand as well, after Severus has brushed off the breadcrumbs on his trousers. His hand is smooth and heavy.

It’s obvious that none of them have met him before, except for Lovegood, but they’ve heard of him. “So you’re Neville’s boyfriend, then,” Potter offers, and the man says, “And you’re the famous Harry Potter,” and Neville’s eyebrows knit together for just a second at that. Potter laughs.

“That’s what they tell me,” he says, gracious as ever, and Severus cannot stay there anymore. He cannot stay in the room.

As the man turns his attention to Granger and asks if she’s the woman transforming the Ministry, a sleazy attempt at flattery, Severus escapes to the bathroom, walks as fast as he can without seeming panicked, and then locks the door and stands there.

He wants to ruin something. Instead, he runs the water in the sink and stares at it, running down the drain.

He’s been stupid. He’s been presumptuous. He’s gotten in too deep in this, whatever that refers to, he shouldn’t have done this. The water keeps gurgling down the drain, a deafening sound, all around him. Defeated, he sits down on the closed toilet lid, absentmindedly putting two fingers to the pulse point on his neck. He’s alive, at least.

It’s almost funny, sitting in here in the tiny bathroom, hearing them talk outside, history repeating like this. James Potter is out there, a small child, somehow outliving Severus, somehow immortal, just like this tightness in his chest he is so familiar with. Now that’s funny. A joke that can never seem to get to the punchline.

He gets up, looks at himself in the mirror. He looks fine, he looks just like he does every day. The problem isn’t that he won’t be able to hide it. And then he turns off the faucet, steps outside and stands there in the darkened hallway, laughter heard in the living room, light spilling in on the stone floors, and before that, the polaroids on the wall. He takes one last look at his portrait, and snatches it off the wall in one smooth movement, crumpling it in his closed fist.

\--

It is mid June. It goes like this:

Severus is lucky there is only a little more than a week left of the school year, so with careful planning, he can pretend to be busy with grading and schoolwork and he won’t have to speak to him too much. He can manage being pleasant in the halls, he can manage looking at him or avoiding looking at him during meetings, at dinner. He won’t subject himself or Neville to any more dinners. The idea itself was bad, thinking he could do this, thinking any good would come of it.

The day before the end of year feast, he brings out the sweater he had carefully hung in his wardrobe and he lays it out again, on the bed, like before. It doesn’t feel the same. The fabric feels coarser, the red seems gaudy, obscene almost. It still smells like Neville, though, a fact he is horrified to discover as he presses the sweater to his face for a short second. No, he has to return it. He can’t.

He sends it off with the house-elves to be laundered and then, when he has it back, the scent is gone. Good. He folds it into a neat square and attaches a note, hastily scribbled letters to make it seem like a last minute addition. ‘Thank you for the loan’, just that and no signature. He’ll know who it’s from either way.

He leaves it on Neville’s desk, doesn’t want to leave it outside his door, and especially doesn’t want to risk bumping into him. So he leaves it there the day before the train is due to leave the station, when he knows that he will return there after his lunch with Draco and after his classes, to pack his things and lock everything up.

It’s not hard to disappear. It will be fine. And then after summer, he will have forgotten what this was like, they can both forget this brief blip in both of their lives, and they can go back to being cordial and professional and colleagues. He doesn’t need anything more than that. He can learn to disregard whatever this is, just as he learns to bear everything else.

He gets through the end of the year faculty meeting, he gets through the dinner, he packs his things, he gets in the carriage to the station, with Draco and no one else. They take the first carriage, both eager to leave, Draco because he’s meeting Astoria and Severus because he won’t stay a second longer than he has to. He knows that Neville will stay an extra day, no chance of running into him on the train, or having to sit through a whole train ride worth of awkward conversation. He has made it.

And then, a plan, so he gets to think as little as possible. He’ll stay for a week or two in Spinner’s End and then he’ll spend the rest of the summer at whatever apartment the old school potions association he sometimes writes articles for can put him up in. They’ve written him for months about helping set up some local potions rooms in connection to a hospital somewhere. He doesn’t quite care where, as long as it’s far away. He doesn’t want to see anything familiar. He wants to grow out of this, somewhere far away, where he doesn’t have to think about him and where he doesn’t have to worry whether he’ll run into him and where he can just forget the whole thing. An unfortunate interlude.

“You’re in a weird mood,” Draco tells him, bored and leisurely leaning back against the train’s seats. The two of them, alone, again. “You’ve been in a weird mood for weeks. Sulking and being all quiet.”

“Am I usually talkative?”

“No, I guess not but… You’ve barely been to see me at all, and not Neville either.”

At the sound of his name, Severus looks away, out the window, to the view like a tapestry, green and grey. Juvenile. Immature gesture.

“What was that?” Draco asks and knocks his knee into Severus’. “You’re upset about something.”

He doesn’t answer him and lets it go for a few moments. Severus almost thinks he’ll get away with this, that he will leave this behind him, that he won’t have to talk about it ever again.

But then, inevitably, “I heard Neville’s boyfriend was at the dinner.” And then, inevitably, Severus’ refusal to look at him, to turn his head away from the blur outside the window. Draco had said it experimentally, but this has confirmed it for him, Severus’ inability to muster even the smallest of barriers to this crushing ache in him. “I’m sorry,” he says, and Severus closes his eyes, can’t even bear the green and the nature outside, just wants to stare at the black inside of his eyelids. Draco sounds sincerely sorry, and Severus hates the fact that he has put him in this situation.

“Why?” he asks, after too long of a pause. “He seemed fine. It was fine.”

Draco doesn’t say anything, just sits there quietly and Severus can feel his eyes on him, cold and icy in intensity. When he looks at him he is struck, again, by how much he looks like his father. A face that isn’t made for sympathy. But he looks at him, quiet and intense, until Severus is forced to look down at his feet.

“Have you met him?” Severus asks, but what he means is, ‘Did you know?’ Was he just the fool, in this? Has he imagined things?

“No, I haven’t,” Draco says, and then tells him about the man. “He told me about him once or twice, seems like they’ve been on and off for a bit.”

Severus must look interested, or desperate, or like he needs something, because Draco hesitantly goes on. “He’s an expat. They met in Belgium, when Neville was there for the summer last year. As part of his apprenticeship, he-“

“Yes, I know,” he says. This part Neville has told him, about the plants and the earth and the books in the Herbology Centre’s library, but nothing about this man. Is that on purpose?

“Yeah,” Draco says, serious and sad. “I didn’t know they… Did Neville…?”

“No,” Severus answers, picking at the fabric of his robes. He isn’t quite sure what Draco is asking, but it hardly matters. He didn’t say anything to him. They never initiated anything. Neville isn’t at fault here, Severus is. He got attached. He did this, again. Attached like a parasite, sucking the future out of everything. It was dumb of him to ignore it for this long. As if he wanted to be friends. As if what he wanted was friendship. He’s been so stupid.

“I am sorry,” Draco repeats, and Severus, irritated and agonising, brushes his hair out of his face and turns to the window again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> also thank you for all the lovely and nice comments on both my other fics, love u


	3. Patience

He is in love. The sad, pathetic fact of it is that he’s in love. He would love not to be, he would adore to be rid of the emotion entirely, but here he is.

The summer is foggy, a blur of faces and things. He works until he can’t think of anything else, and still, there it is. There he is. They give him an apartment, this company that he knows almost nothing about. Government adjacent? They’ve read an article he wrote and have wanted him to design a few potions sections of several hospitals, teach the workers etc. It is tiring work that requires him to think about nothing else but the work at hand, doesn’t require him to socialise, and that is exactly what he wants. It is perfect. It is perfect for a few weeks.

He goes with the foremen and the officials to dinner, he goes to work, he writes recommended orders for potions materials and ingredients and tools, is shot down by budget restraints, or space restrictions, or import rules. He plans and writes rules and guides and safety instructions. Instructions for healing potions, mostly, for pain or lack of sleep or anxiety, all of the failings of the body. As far as karma goes, it is fine. He can use all the good karma he can get, he supposes.

And then, at night, he sits in his provisional office in his provisional apartment and writes notes he can’t read or has to scrap when he wakes up in the morning. They give him days off, of course, that he spends in bed or walking around the city, the industrial, gum speckled concrete and then the cobblestone of the old town. Blends in with muggle tourists in museums, or parks, or coffee shops.

He watches people, like he always does, but now he finds him everywhere. Neville. In the shape of someone’s throat, the gait of a passer-by, clear and thrilling laughter echoing through an empty museum hall. Like ghosts, wherever he goes, shadows of him, clouding the sky, getting his hopes up that he will turn around or take a closer look, and there he will be. Smiling, happy.

One night he goes to a bar, makes eye contact with a man across the room, until that man approaches him, until that man takes him home and fucks him. Something he hasn’t done in years, with a man or a woman. He doesn’t imagine it’s him. He’s not that sad. But he does lie awake next to this stranger, as the man speaks to him in half hearted English and then, afterwards, he thinks of him, he finds him in the white, uneven plaster stretching out across the ceiling.

He tells him that in a letter, one of many that he doesn’t send, that he needs to write because he needs to get it out of him, the same way he needs for his body to go through the motions with this stranger, so that maybe, in the repetition, in the scratching of the quill against parchment, in the man’s hands over his body, that maybe, in that, this feeling will leave him.

 _I hope you’re well,_ he starts, as if he’ll hear from him, as if he won’t just stuff these letters into his desk and then into the trash. After that, he tells him of the weather, or the work, or the people he has met or watched from a far. He describes the man’s apartment, an apartment in the old town, full of bourgeois luxury, all soft, velvety drapes and half expensive paintings. He tells him of the breakfast the morning after, and the muggle man giving him his number, and telling him to call him, something they both know Severus will never do, even if he had access to a phone. _I would have called you. If it were you. I would have agonised with my phone in my hand like a teenager, unable to properly type the number, and when you answered I would pretend I had just thought of it, had just picked up the phone on a whim._ He asks him if he has ever used a muggle phone, describes the one his parents had, the one that still stands in the attic of his house, unplugged. He does his best to describe its ring, the noise it made, the tinny and metallic bell sound that would startle all three of them, wherever they were in the house.

It helps. The writing, when he just can’t push it away anymore, he writes, and it helps for a few days. He keeps it to a letter a week max, and by the end of the summer he has accumulated ten of them. He doesn’t let himself ramble, he is coherent, even when he’s farfetched. These are things he would never say to him, yes, but this is how he would say it, if he could. He signs all of them with his name, simply Severus Snape, both first and last name. All of him.

He tells him of things he has seen or tasted or heard that he wishes Neville could have witnessed as well. The sprawling branches of the ancient trees in the park near his apartment. The sun’s movement across the ceiling and then wall and then floor of his bedroom, over the stacked papers on the now ink spotted desk, the half-unpacked suitcase by the foot of his bed. The superb cup of coffee he finds during his last week there, in a coffee shop halfway across the city, served by a surly teenager with hair the exact same shade as the Hogwarts Quidditch field in Spring.

_I miss you. I love you. I wish, simply, for you._

\--

Eventually summer ends. He has done his job, he has received their thanks and their considerable pay check, as well as an address if he ever wants to work for them again. He is efficient and quiet and low maintenance, although maybe not sociable, but that’s not what they hired him for. They’re pleased with the work, and so is he, and pleased by the distraction.

And then, he is in Britain again, at Hogwarts, again, standing in his own rooms, lying in his own bed, eating the familiar, warming Hogwarts food.

He is pleased to see Draco again, and his colleagues. Draco comes back to Hogwarts a married man, a whole different person, a whole different life. He and Astoria have eloped. He’s sorry that Severus couldn’t be there, but it was sort of the point, to have no one there but them and the Ministry witnesses. Severus can draw his own conclusions about the Malfoy family’s opinions on this break of tradition. Draco seems happy. Happier than he has ever been. Astoria too, seems radiant. They have a dinner where she gives him a heartfelt thanks for keeping Draco safe, something he didn’t think would have such an impact on him, but leaves him coughing down his drink and avoiding her eyes. She tells him this while Draco is in the bathroom of the fancy London restaurant they’re in, and also that Draco thinks so highly of him. That she is glad that at least Severus approves of them getting married.

“I approve,” Severus tells her. “Wholeheartedly.”

And he is back, also, to Neville, who doesn’t look different at all. Tanned maybe, a slight red tinge on his ears and his cheeks that will mellow to a soft brown, as if he is bathed in light. He tries not to stare at him, will allow himself to look for just a few moments before having to rush off, before oops his classes are starting, oh no, I have too much work, oh I can’t I’m on my way to… something. He is running out of excuses. That is what he should have done instead of writing sappy letters, he should have thought this through more. He shouldn’t have relied on his own ability to suppress and forget and stifle.

(He pulls them out of his suitcase, those letters, that he didn’t throw away at all, this sign of his own humanity and stubbornness that he couldn’t bring himself to toss into the fireplace, and then buries them deep in his desk drawer, underneath old class notes and broken quills.)

“Hey,” Neville tells him, and it is obvious that he too has noticed these short talks, Severus already on the verge of running away as soon as he sees him. This time he has cornered him in the teacher’s lounge, before a meeting that Severus needs to attend. “Did you have a nice summer?”

“Yes,” Severus says. “Did you?”

“Yeah,” he says, smiling in a way meant to encourage and invite. “Yeah, I slept a lot. Spent some time working in the garden. My grandmother’s place isn’t ideal for it, all we have is this little patch of dirt, but you know… Very easy to put off getting your own place when you live here for most of the year.”

When Severus offers only a weak “Hm,” in response, he trudges on.

“Harry said that you were… building hospitals or something?” The bane of his existence, Harry Potter, always wanting updates on his life, as if Severus is a child that can’t be left alone, as if Harry Potter is somehow responsible for him. Maybe he is. Maybe Potter is the one he can blame for his miserable existence.

“Or something, yes,” he says, even though he’s dying to clear this up, even though he’s dying to explain it all to him, to hear his thoughts and watch his reactions. Tell him about the surly foremen and that no, he did not build hospitals, he was a consultant, he didn’t actually hammer any nails. He wants to tell him about the old witch he rented the apartment from, and her yappy, horrible little dog. He wants to describe the taste of the delicious coffee, that find he was so proud of but had no one to tell about.

“Noble,” Neville says, obviously teasing him. Severus has missed him. Severus has missed his voice, listening to him talk, watching his hands as he gestures. He gestures as he talks, slow, steady movements that emphasise his point clearly, that sometimes fiddle with things, coffee cups or spoons or his sweater, just like his sentences sometimes trail off or get interrupted by new thoughts or like his words repeat themselves when he is nervous.

“The pay was noble,” he says, something that means nothing, really, but he says it blandly enough that the conversation dies off.

This happens several times, Severus trying his hardest to be as dim-witted and uninteresting as possible, so that he’ll leave him alone. They run into each other in the halls, in between classes, or end up next to each other at Quidditch games, or make eye contact during a meeting. And for a few weeks this works just fine. He avoids him by eating lunch with Draco in the teacher’s lounge, by scheduling his outings when he knows Neville is busy, with his panel talks or with classes. He patrols the halls at nights when Neville has invited him to dinner.

His therapist has noticed the difference. “You haven’t mentioned Neville Longbottom in a while, did something happen?”

“No,” he tells her, and discovers, with surprise and disappointment and a sickening sense of accomplishment, that if he makes an effort to lie to her she is fooled. He thought she would be better at her job than this. “He’s been busy, I think. There’s nothing much to say.”

His colleagues have noticed the difference. Several times he has been asked to locate Neville, or been asked where he is or what he’s doing or if he knows if Neville will come to the meeting next week, does Severus think he would he be willing to chaperone the Hogsmeade visit next weekend? He answers them with boredom, indifference, not anger or sadness, and eventually they learn not to ask.

This plan involves slow work. A slow extrication of everything he has touched and every place their lives have intertwined. Most often, it doesn’t seem to make a difference. Neville tries, again and again, to talk to him, to invite him to things. He is nothing if not persistent, even in this, a trait that Severus would find charming if it didn’t make things so difficult.

One thing that makes him think that this might work, that history might not repeat itself in this particular instance, is Hitchens. This year he has flourished. Severus has watched, ever since the panel talk when he was so harsh, and this year seems like a fresh start for him. He sees him in the hallways with friends, an awkward bunch of sixth and seventh years that seem to stand his particular strangeness, can match it with their own, and it is nice to see. He knows Neville has invited him to tea, and study meetings, and that Hagrid and him have taken groups of students down to the lake to watch the flora and fauna, and that they’ve made a point to invite Hitchens specifically. He still asks too many questions, he can still show off that particular brand of teenage cruelty, but there is no anger behind it now. Severus wonders if he would have made different choices, if he had someone consider him like Neville does Hitchens. Paying attention. Maybe, maybe not. But it is a testament to things maybe, perhaps, being capable of being different.

Like Severus can be different. He can choose not to put himself through this again, like with Lily. Not repeat what he did to Lily. Not build the pedestal so high this time.

\--

And then, the long stretch of December, cold and alternatively muddy and icy, until there’s nothing but snow. They have their worst snowstorm for years, pellets of hard ice hitting the windows with a noise like thunder. Walls of snow build up against the walls and doors and windows, making it close to impossible to go outside. It snows for days and days, the weight of it causing cracks and breaks in the wooden beams of the roof that they have to spend hours fixing and patching. Quidditch practice gets cancelled, as well as some of the extra curriculars, even despite the tunnels they’ve dug in the snow, so the students can scurry from warm doorway to warm doorway. Care of Magical Creatures does a drastic shift to theory and Neville works tirelessly to make sure the knotgrass doesn’t die of frostbite, with the greenhouses so exposed to the storm. Severus helps, because he feels like he can, because they’re both so focused on the task at hand that there’s no time for talking and because both Minerva and Draco are there. For a few hours they strengthen the heating spells and the insulation, and follow Neville’s instructions for placement of the pots. The work is fine, the idle times when he happens upon him is not. He keeps having moments of terror during brief conversations with Neville, when they bump into each other in the hallways, or when they are seated next to each other in the Great Hall. Anxious and unwelcome thoughts that they will be snowed in somewhere together, get stuck or caught in the cold and be forced to share a space, to talk. An unfamiliar claustrophobia, flaring up when he can smell the earth on Neville’s hands or when he sees the cold sting his skin into pinks and reds, across his cheeks and down towards his chest and neck, on the tender skin beneath his ears. He is worried and paranoid, most of the time, and he suspects Neville can tell. He suspects Minerva can tell, and his colleagues.

Draco knows, a welcome respite from this constant worry of being caught in the act of something. He already knows, and, after several unsuccessful attempts on Draco’s behalf to have a civilised conversation about it, he respects Severus’ preference for ignoring it. Trying to ignore it. Draco has resigned himself to carefully looking at him during the sparse lunches the three of them have together, or offering him excuses when Neville invites him to dinners or to sit with him during Quidditch matches or faculty meetings. It’s fine. He prefers not to talk about it. And Draco is busy, with work and with Astoria, and Severus can keep it together. He’s kept worse secrets before.

When he gets the little note from Draco, swishing up to his desk in the middle of class, he expects that it’s about this worry. That, somehow, something has collapsed or fallen in on itself, or someone has been caught outside in the wind and the snow. That Severus himself has made this happen somehow, somewhere.

_Neville’s in the hospital wing. Thought you might want to know._

That’s the only thing it says, scribbled in Draco’s spindly, boyish handwriting on a spare piece of parchment.

He stares at it as he waits for class to end, watches his third years try to perform a freezing spell unsuccessfully. Just ten minutes. Despite that, he dismisses them early, impatient and scared, and no one corrects him on the time.

On his trip up to the hospital wing, he goes over possibilities. He saw him yesterday, in Greenhouse six. Did he not make it to his quarters? Did he somehow get trapped outside, stayed outside during the night? Did he suddenly remember some sort of cold loving plant he wanted to take a sampling of and venture out into the half collapsed snow tunnels towards the lake? Severus tries to think of a plant like that, something that Neville may have talked about, and comes up with nothing. For a school, Hogwarts is horribly unsafe. For a school, there are quite a lot of things that can kill you, even in the warmer months. A rogue Bludger, falling off a broom, the Whomping Willow, the stairs moving at an inopportune time and a fall, onto the hard stone floor. A student trying a dangerous spell. Anything.

He tries not to imagine it, but the image shows up in his head uninvited anyway, Neville, crushed, on the stone floor, bones at the wrong angle, the horrible wet noise of it, the empty eyes. Himself bleeding out on the floor of the Shrieking Shack, but now instead of his own pale fingers trying to stop the gushing blood it is Neville’s sturdy and broad palms pressing down on the wound and at that thought he has to stop, in the middle of the hallway, breathe, before he makes the climb to the Hospital Wing.

He can hear Neville laughing, even before he’s stepped foot in the Infirmary, and the sound of it makes him so relieved that it bubbles over into anger. Anger at himself, mostly, that he has allowed this worry to be so everyday and yet is so completely unprepared to face it. Anger at Neville, maybe, for existing, and all the perils that entails, Severus included.

He’s sitting on a bed in the back of the otherwise empty room, and when Draco steps aside, Severus sees him, all of him, and the arm.

“What happened?” he asks, and the echoing of his footsteps still haven’t died out yet.

“Severus,” Draco says, and Neville looks up at him from where he’s sitting. “I didn’t expect you to come all the way up here.”

Severus doesn’t know what to say to that, so he just glares at the two of them, and his right arm, at the reddened skin poking out of his dress shirt, and the strange angle of it.

“What did you do?”

Before anyone can answer him, Pomfrey pushes past him, holding a potion for him to drink, a healing potion that Severus made, impatiently holding it out for him. “Not one single day without one of you almost getting yourselves killed, hm?” she says, and looks disapprovingly at Neville. “Always in and out of this place, even when you were even more babyfaced than now.”

“Thank you,” Neville says, chastised and quiet, and still amused. He turns to Severus, after swallowing his potion, and after Pomfrey has looked over Draco’s work with the numbing spells with careful scrutiny. “I had a little accident with the Devil’s Snare with the first years, that’s all.”

“A little accident,” Draco mutters. “The radius and the ulna are completely shattered.”

“Aren’t you supposed to keep me calm, Healer Malfoy?” Neville asks, wincing slightly when Draco shifts his arm around. “No, but, I, uh… You know how the kids are. It got a hold of one of them, which is fine, you know, I was on my way to get it off her, but then she got scared and tried to fling it off and it was so drowsy from the cold she actually managed to do it, and, uh, it attached to my arm instead and just-“ With his other arm, the one that doesn’t have a scratch on it, he clenches his fist to illustrate the plant vines squeezing around his arm. “And then all of them got scared and no one could hand me my wand and… Well, it took a while to get it off me. One of them had the bright idea of trying to cut the vine off, and that only made it more angry. I mean, understandably, if someone-“

“You idiot,” Severus says, so angry now. “You damn idiot.”

He might be raising his voice, because Pomfrey looks over at him from the bed across the row, stern and disapproving. He doesn’t care.

“Is Sprout so poor of a teacher that she never taught you to keep your wand at hand? Or did you just not think?”

Neville bites the inside of his mouth for a second and then, in an annoyed and quick movement, gets to his feet, surprising both Draco and Severus, who takes a step back. “Oh, fuck off, Severus. Don’t yell at me right now.”

Severus doesn’t know what to say, and neither does Draco, it seems. He looks between them, unsure if he should manhandle Neville back on the bed, and it feels like it would go on forever, this tension. It doesn’t, is broken by Pomfrey clearing her throat and stepping in between them. “Well, Severus, you heard the man,” she says, annoyed at the raised voices and the disarray, and at Severus. She pushes him out of the way and Neville into the bed again.

Instead he stays, sits down on the bed opposite him and gets out a weak and mumbling “You’re right. I’m sorry.” Somehow that makes it alright for him to stay, to sit there and look at his knit together hands in his lap, and be quiet.

Eventually Pomfrey leaves to tend to paperwork, and Severus just watches Draco work. The tricky part, he has understood from years of Slytherins breaking arms and legs and bones, is that the bone has to align properly. A clean break is fine, that fits into itself neatly, but something like this is difficult. ‘Shattered’, Draco had said. So he works carefully and slowly, knitting each piece of bone together separately with his wand, instead of with the easier potion. It’s slow and painful, even with Severus’ potion, he can tell by the tenseness in Neville’s hand on the sheet and his lips pressed together until they’re white. He’s right, Severus shouldn’t have yelled. He shouldn’t have yelled either way, but especially not now.

“This is the best I can do, I think,” Draco says, scratching his nose with the back of his hand. “I’ll give you some more pain potion and you’ll stay here for tonight, if that sounds alright?”

“What do you mean, the best you can do?” Severus asks, because Neville seems too tired to say anything.

Draco looks at him as if he’d forgotten he was there. “There might be a chance I missed some bone fragments, but all the pieces I can see are fused now. It’s just a precaution. And because we’ll have easier access to pain relief and healing potion up here. It’ll probably hurt for a bit, and the muscles are still sore.”

The arm looks better now, less red and less strangely shaped. Severus is satisfied with this answer, so he nods and Draco looks between them again, before hesitantly sliding over to Pomfrey’s office.

“Are you staying?” Neville asks him, as he shifts on the bed. He still looks angry at him.

“I can stay.” He has missed dinner, and outside it is already pitch black.

“Great,” Neville says, insincerely, and glares at his feet, trying to shift higher up on the bed to be able to lie down. He looks like it hurts to move, and hurts even more to have to shift his arm like that.

“I can help you?” Severus offers, and reaches out his hand to the arm not in bandages, to steady him so he can manoeuvre. He waits until Neville makes eye contact and nods at him, before he gently places his hand around the bicep of his left arm and holds him tightly upright. This is the first time they’ve touched for months. Ever since Neville’s steady, warm hand on his back, all those months ago on the roof. Neville hesitates for a second and then reaches out to grab the front of Severus’ robes, to heave himself upwards and backwards, to the head of the bed.

“Thanks,” he says, as he lets him go and then watches as Severus pulls a chair out from the adjacent bedside and sits down, awkwardly and uncomfortably. And then silence, until Neville takes a sip of the water Draco left for him and then gazes into the glass, frowning, before meeting Severus’ eyes again. Firm and confused.

“Did I do something?” he asks, and it makes Severus ache, deep in his stomach and in his spine. “You didn’t write me all summer, which is fine, I guess. I went to a boarding school for seven years, I know how that happens, how you’re friends with people you see every day and then summer comes and it’s a whole other life. I get that, and I don’t want to make it weird. I’m not a child, I understand if you don’t want to talk to me. But we’ve been back at school for so long now, you’ve been ignoring me for months, and I just… Why? Are you angry with me? Say that then.”

The question is childish and so adult at once, that Severus doesn’t know what to do with himself. Why don’t you like me, is what he’s asking, but he’s asking it so bluntly and so directly, that Severus is unavoidably impressed. It’s a question of treatment, he understands that. Neville isn’t blaming him for how he feels but how he has acted. The ache spreads and he looks away from his open and disappointed face.

“No,” he says. “No, I’m sorry.”

He thinks then, about telling him all of it. Confessing, and seeing what Neville will do with the information if he dumps it out all over the floor, the linens, lets it stain everything. What if he tells him he did write, he just never sent the letters? Wrote down pathetic drivel that would make him never want to see him again. The kind of emotion that is, in fact, unwanted and intrusive and wrong. The fact that even if Neville wasn’t with someone else, it is still unthinkable? He would be mad, to choose that. Severus has made the choice for him.

“What is it, then?” he asks. He just wants to know.

“I’ve been… Yes, I see how I’ve been avoidant,” he says. “I didn’t mean for it to… impact you.”

He looks like he wants to yell at him, say something scathing, but of course he doesn’t. “I consider you a close friend,” he says, instead. “Of course it would impact me.”

Severus doesn’t know what to say to that, so he avoids answering the statement at all. “I’ve been busy. It’s nothing to do with you. It’s nothing you did.”

Hesitantly, he puts the water glass down and then, after what seems like ages, he nods. He’s aware that Severus isn’t telling the truth, but he seems to respect his need to keep things to himself. “Alright. Fine.”

He isn’t happy about it, Severus can tell, but he won’t push. Maybe he knows, deep down, what the problem is. Maybe this is them, together, deciding to ignore this. He can live with that. It’s for the best.

\--

He sits there and they talk, have an actual conversation for the first time in months. Severus tells him about the summer, Neville tells several truly frustrating stories about his grandmother. They talk about Neville being named Head of House for Gryffindor, how he’s finding it more responsibility than he thought. He tells him, before falling asleep, that he has missed talking to him. Severus can’t remember anyone ever saying that to him, and it does nothing but emphasise how difficult it is going to be.

He doesn’t have a plan, for this part, he thinks as he watches Neville’s eyes drift closed as he talks. Or, his plan was to ignore him and distance himself and that has obviously not been successful. His own reluctance to grin and bear this is surprising and unwanted. A year ago, did he think he had a chance here? Before he knew that Neville was taken, did he think they were moving towards something? Was he that delusional?

His right arm rests across his stomach and the other one slumps limply, almost slipping off the bed. Severus doesn’t dare touch him like this, feels like it would be crossing a boundary he doesn’t want to cross if he were to do reach over and shift his arm back on the bed, but he does look at his relaxed arm for far too long. And the rest of him. His face, slack, with the slight shape of a frown on it, the light stubble starting to shade his chin and jaw, the naked stretch of throat he can see over the half open shirt. Severus has seen beautiful people before, sure, even more classical beauties maybe, but none of them have ever made him ache like this, made his insides jump like this. Like someone stuck their hand in his chest, the place where his ribs open up, and just twisted. Every time he looks at him, especially now. He looks so young, smooth and calm. He gets up when he is sure Neville is asleep and he won’t wake him up by leaving, and passes Pomfrey’s office on the way out, where the light spills out and she is listening to the radio at a barely audible level. He apologises for shouting, tells her to send a note if she needs more potions, and she reminds him that that is technically Slughorn’s job now. A joke, since they both know Slughorn will grumble about Severus stealing his work assignments but will not actually do it himself.

He decides that there’s nothing wrong with talking to him, even if there is no hope, even if it is stagnant and bound to drown him some way or another. Nothing wrong with looking at him from afar. He does so as Neville’s arm heals, slowly and surely, and Neville himself surely and slowly warms up to him again. It seems almost like before, like he has been waiting for him. Of course. It would be unlike Neville to hold a grudge, and it is so like him to be so welcoming and patient. For a few days, Neville lets Severus and Draco bring him his dinner in his quarters, since his right hand is still in a sling and he has trouble using his wand with the left, which leads to trouble carrying things and moving around. It’s the first time Severus has been in his rooms for months, and he is surprised that it still smells the same, still looks roughly the same. More books perhaps, and more plants.

“How is the poison ivy?” Severus offers as a peace gift, and Neville laughs.

“Fine, thank you,” and, after a small pause, “She’s great, actually.”

Both of them miss the Christmas celebration before the winter break, no chaperoning this year, when Severus instead offers to help move the Devil’s Snare somewhere where it will be, as Neville puts it ‘less stressed out’. It is a nice evening, a mirroring of the year before, the two of them in the silent snow, although Severus ends up a little more sweaty and strained than he would like to be, a slightly humiliating reminder of his age and build. But nice, nonetheless. He tells him more, of what he did this summer, as they drink tea by his fireplace afterwards, listening to the dim noise of kids laughing in the inner courtyard, the distant thumping of the music.

By the actual winter break, the broken bones are fine, although the muscles are still sore, he tells him. Draco did a good job, which he tells him the evening before he leaves, when they’re off to see if the section of roof they sometimes climb up to is still intact, underneath the snow.

“I’ve broken a lot of bones, this turned out fine,” he says, absentminded and amused. “My nose was the worst, I think.”

Neville has told him already, of nights spent in the Room of Requirement, of the Carrows breaking his nose when he refused to perform the Cruciatus. The guilt is still overwhelming, in the face of this. Guilt, a useless emotion. At least anger spurs him into action.

The roof was a lost cause, nothing seems to be in too rough of a shape, but the snow is still too thick and overwhelming to make the climb, especially with Neville’s arm still sore. So they call it a day and head down to Neville’s quarters, to sit in front of his fire and drink whiskey, and on the walk down, Severus considers emotions spurring him into action. He has so much energy, from this, this crush, that he surely could use for something else. He thinks of Neville and his therapist and Draco, and thinks that maybe he can _better himself._ Anger has always been at the heart of the things he does, that or fear, which is blinding and energy sucking. But this, as well. This yearning, for whatever it is, for him, couldn’t that energy be used for something else? Isn’t that what he does, when he tries to distract himself? Isn’t that what he did this summer?

He ponders this as Neville talks about his plans for Christmas, going off to see his grandmother in a few days, visiting his parents in the hospital. He hasn’t told her about his arm, he says, and when Severus asks why he says he doesn’t want to worry her.

“I’m sorry,” Severus says again. “For being so… for yelling at you. I was… worried, I suppose.”

He frowns, down at his own feet, and nods. “It’s fine, really. It was quite fun telling you to fuck off.”

“Pomfrey loved hearing it as well, I’m sure,” he says, and Neville smiles.

\--

So what, then? During winter break, which he spends alone in his quarters, sorting the papers for this semester, he stumbles on an essay that Hitchens wrote. Well-written, a little too haughty and pedantic, but the research is solid and the thesis is at least more interesting than the usual braindead repetition. He’s in his sixth year now, so the material is more open to interpretation. Severus likes giving them essays instead of sit down tests, if nothing for his own sanity’s sake.

He’s mean, in the scribbled feedback. Not like he remembers being towards Granger, for example, or Neville, but he does sound dismissive, and to put it plainly, rude.

And in a stroke of genius, that he will later think is sappy and overreaching, he realises that is it. One of the things he feels guilt over, the thing that won’t go away, no matter how much he talks it over with his therapist, is the unprovoked meanness. He is mean, which he has previously thought is a facet of his personality, but now is starting to think is just a reaction to perceived slights, from people who couldn’t possibly be responsible for them. It isn’t Hitchens’ fault that he reminds him of Severus himself, it isn’t Neville’s fault, it isn’t Potter’s. He knows that, has always known that, he isn’t delusional, but the idea that he can do something about it other than apologise is close to overpowering.

He rewrites his comments on the essay, on all of them. He thinks of what Neville would say, he tries to be kind and encouraging, something that looks so strange written in his handwriting. This mostly consists of him going into further detail, not just telling them to do it over, not just giving them a list of flaws. He is aware of the Dickensian scene he is a part of, a sullen old man having a change of heart in the middle of the night, in the middle of Christmas, but for once he can ignore the urge to watch himself from afar.

He tries this again, at the faculty’s New Year’s Eve dinner, he tries doing what he thinks Neville would do. He tries to be kind, not the type of nice that puts a bad taste in his mouth, the kind of nice that Potter treats him with, that’s grounded in pity.

He tries asking follow up questions, when Slughorn starts to go on about some trip to Canada he took years ago. He tries complimenting Minerva’s gloves, which feels strange and which she meets with a frown and raised eyebrows, and a lingering pink blush on her cheeks that might be from the glass of wine she had with dinner, or it might be a flustered response to something else. It is slightly rewarding, yes. He can see the appeal, of behaving like an actual person. Not that he would be rude before, but he would be so guided by mood or temporary emotion, or just tiredness. He can make a conscious effort to not take that out on others.

The day after Neville returns to school, he shows up at Severus’ door, and Severus feels a slight panic bubbling up. Maybe he also blushes now. He has been nice to Neville, but he doesn’t know whether he’s been kind, and whether that kindness matters if it’s motivated by wanting him. And Neville is so kind, always. Forgiving.

Severus watches him warily, as he takes in his quarters, the neat and overfilled bookcases, the open fireplace and the sofa, where Severus sometimes falls asleep if he has woken up in the middle of the night, having trouble breathing, feeling the pain in his neck where Nagini bit down ache out across his shoulders. The kitchenette, smaller than Neville’s actual kitchen. He peers, curiously, into Severus’ bedroom, into the closet that he left open this morning, as Severus scrambles to make coffee for them.

“I like the windows,” he mumbles, more to himself than to Severus, and the two of them stare into the pane of glass high on the wall that faces the green, murky waters of the lake. His quarters are next to the Slytherin common rooms, as they have always been, and therefore lie slightly underneath the lake.

“Thank you,” Severus says, strangely, and pours them the coffee, in the two only mugs that he has.

“You don’t have a lot of things,” Neville comments and seems to realise that he could be interpreted as rude, and quickly adds, “Not that, uh, you need to… I don’t think it-“

“I don’t really see the need,” Severus says. His parents’ house was always filled to the brim with clutter, unused furniture that his father had inherited, packaging, boxes that once held plates or pots but then were left in the hallways or in the kitchen filled with balled up newspaper and then never moved. Not squalor, not precisely untidy, but a labyrinth of things that even now seems to cling to the place. “I have what I need. I suppose I have more things in my office. Or the house.”

Severus hands him his coffee and watches as he blows on the surface of it, holding it in two hands, still letting his eyes roam over the place, like he’s staring at Severus, like he is scrutinising Severus. He feels the urge to keep talking, fill the space with something other than this nakedness, but he stops himself. He’s already talked too much about himself. He is still standing, just there, in the open space that Severus doesn’t use for anything, between the sofa and the fireplace and the kitchenette. He wanders, absentmindedly, shifting the over shoulder bag he has with him as he leans to look at things.

“Did you enjoy Christmas?” Severus asks, and then bites the inside of his lip. A horrible question, that doesn’t mean anything, but Neville doesn’t react.

“Yes, thank you,” he just says, and they make small talk about their break. He looks beautiful, startlingly so in here. The blue of his coat, the gold of his hair, makes him look like some sort of stone, something precious that Severus has unearthed or tricked into coming here, his lair. His cheeks are still a patchy red, from the cold outside, from the walk here from his own rooms, through the dungeons, all the way here.

“Is this your mother?” he asks, and then, in a delighted tone, “Is this you?” and points to the small picture of the two of them, one of the few Severus has. It’s a muggle picture, unmoving, taken by a co-worker of his father. The two of them, sitting at the dinner table, both of them looking up at him with disinterested dark eyes, as if they’ve been bothered. He is sixteen or seventeen, and his mother is a few years away from dying.

“Yes,” he admits, reluctantly.

“You look just like her,” he says, but doesn’t comment on the nose, or the sour look on their faces. “Is she…?” he continues, and turns to look at Severus. They’re too close now, with this eye contact, so Severus lingers a few steps away.

“She died when I was in my twenties,” Severus says. “A little younger than you, I suppose. Her and then my father.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, and seems to mean it. He falls quiet and examines the picture even closer, leaning in to make it out in the dim light. “You’re… you look like such a teenager.”

“Yes, I was, regretfully, once a child,” Severus mumbles, and Neville laughs, a pretty and light laugh that sounds out of place. “Did you come here for coffee, or did you need something?”

He sounds perhaps, a little harsh, but the turn the conversation has taken makes him uneasy. Neville is unperturbed. “Yes, right,” he says. “I have a, uh, it’s nothing really but…”

He rummages around in his bag, and pulls out a package, holding it out for Severus to take.

“It’s a Christmas gift, I guess,” he says, and awkwardly shifts his feet. “Or, uh, I know that your birthday is coming up. I was in Knockturn Alley for, well it doesn’t matter, not for anything shifty, I was there with Luna for something she needed for her article, we strolled around and, I don’t know if you’ve visited the bookstore by that bar with the big red sign, but they had some nice things and I saw that and thought you might like it. As a combined gift. And also a thank you for helping me as my arm heals. And I know you weren’t expecting a gift, so don’t feel like you owe me a Christmas gift or anything.”

As he talks, Severus holds the package in his hands and carefully unwraps the brown paper it is neatly wrapped in. “I…” he says, in the silence that has appeared in the room after Neville has stopped talking. “Thank you,” he settles on. It’s a book on the uses of dragon organs in potions that he’s been looking for, a rather grisly thing he remembers mentioning to Neville months ago, before the summer, wishing he hadn’t said anything, wishing he wasn’t so macabre. It’s rare. It must have been expensive.

“You’re welcome.”

He makes a cheesecake, later in January on his actual birthday, perhaps made specifically for the occasion, although Severus doesn’t ask. A horrible and soggy thing that Severus eats with hard to disguise displeasure, and then, when Neville tries it and asks him why he didn’t tell him it was horrible, he doesn’t know what to say.

“This is progress, Severus,” his therapist says, when he tells her about the decision towards change, and the immediate good karma, the gift that feels like a sign that he’s doing something right. She tells him it is hard work, but that she’s happy he is aware it needs to be done.

Sometimes he watches Neville twinge a little as he uses his wand or pulls out a chair, or stretch it absentmindedly as he talks, and he wants to offer him anything, everything. More healing potions, more help lifting things. Severus catches himself almost offering to help him during class, but in the end catches the words in his throat. They do sit and grade papers together, prepare coursework, because then Severus can make sure he doesn’t sit up all night and try to catch up on work, something Draco has told him he’s worried about. “He needs to rest,” Draco says, fussing. Neville’s lesson plans are more enthusiastic and thought through than anything Severus has ever done for class. Maybe when Albus first made him DADA teacher, maybe those first few lessons, but he can’t remember ever loving it as much as Neville does.

“Do you think it matters, really? That you put in all this extra work?” he asks one of the few afternoons when neither of them have any classes and can sit at Severus’ desk and drink cup after cup of coffee. Neville looks up at him and pushes his hair behind his ears, resting his quill in the pot of ink they’re sharing.

“Yes,” he says, smiling at him, and Severus can tell he wants to say something.

“What?” he asks, perhaps a little bit too sharply. “I’m simply saying that you’re making more work for yourself.”

“It was nothing,” Neville mumbles.

“You obviously want to say something. What?” he repeats, and Neville leans back in his seat.

“We’re very different types of teachers, that’s all. I don’t mind the extra work.”

“And what does that mean, Professor?” Severus asks, a little too sarcastically. He puts his quill down on the open notebook, lets the ink pool into the page, knows he can erase it later.

“You are a very skilled man,” he says cautiously.

“But as a teacher, I’m rather shit, is that what you mean?” Severus asks, the amusement at Neville putting his foot in his mouth outweighing the tinge of hurt. “How would you know?”

“You were my teacher for seven years, are you joking?” Neville says heatedly, but still maybe joking, gesturing in a way that makes Severus grateful he has already put his quill down. “You are singlehandedly responsible for making me hate potions. Maybe I would have been Potions Master instead of Herbology teacher, if you hadn’t been such an asshole, did you ever think of that?”

“Six years.”

“What?”

“I only taught you for six years, then I was headmaster. And the sixth year I was teaching Defence Against the Dark Arts. Didn’t make you hate that, did I?”

“Alright, fine, you are a better teacher in DADA than Potions, are you satisfied?”

Severus suspects Neville may actually have taken offence, and Severus fiddles with the quill, frowning down at the parchment in front of him with scribbled pages to reference. He suspects he himself might have taken offence.

“Let’s just get back to this. Forget it,” Neville mumbles, and picks up the book he’s leafing through from the desk and places it in his lap instead, fiddling with the bookmark he has improvised from a folded napkin.

“You don’t want to give me some tips then? A teaching strategy my 20 year career hasn’t clued me in on, perhaps?” Severus pushes, because he notoriously doesn’t know when to stop. He can hear it himself, what an annoying prick he sounds like. Neville gave him an out and he didn’t take it. He doesn’t know why he insists, they both know that Neville is a better teacher than he is.

Neville bites the inside of his cheek and breathes out roughly. “Alright, I like my students to learn things in class and I provide the support and flexibility it takes for all of them to do that. Not just the ones I like, or the ones that have a natural knack for it.”

“You’re saying I don’t want my students to learn?”

“I’m saying that you don’t create an environment where all of them can.”

Severus’ leg twitches up and down in frustration and when he goes to put his hand on his knee to still it, he swipes his hand through the puddle of ink forming around his quill. He swears under his breath and looks at the black on his hands and the page in front of him with brows knitted together.

Neville leans forward and catches his gaze. “I can tell you’re upset, so I’m sorry. I’m just… do you like being a teacher? What’s the point of being one if you’re not going to help your students?”

“Half-hearted apology but thank you, I suppose.” He ignores the rest of the statement, because he doesn’t know what the truth is there. He’s angry because he knows Neville is right. He has gotten better, he thinks, but still. Still, he is stagnant in that. And Neville doesn’t know about his change of heart, his conscious effort towards betterment, does he? He’s just going off what he knows.

Neville huffs out a laugh, gaining momentum. “Ah, you’re right. ‘I’m sorry for the way I’ve behaved, I was purposely cruel,’” he quotes in an exaggerated approximation of Severus’ nasal drawl draped over Neville’s own voice. The words Severus used in the greenhouse all that time ago, that apology he had rehearsed so vigorously and still made such a mess of. He can feel his face stiffen. “’There’s no excuse for it, I’m trying to be better.’ Is that better?”

“Right,” Severus says quietly, barely moving his mouth, all the heat and energy seeping out of him, or retreating deep into his muscles. He looks down at his hands again, and ignores the twinge of whatever it is in the pit of his stomach. The words feel cheap and silly and dramatic, now that Neville has thrown them back at him like this and the fact that he has remembered the exact words sparks a panic in him, the fact that the things he says and does have a lasting impact. That there is a version of him in Neville, and that that version is cruel, stupid and overdramatic.

Neville stares at him, opens his mouth and then closes it. He too, slumps back in his seat, looks small and tired. “No, I’m sorry, that was…”

“Stop it,” Severus says, and he stands to avoid having to look at him, jumps on the excuse of getting a rag from one of the drawers in the bookshelves to wipe the ink from his hand. “You’re right.”

He stands there in silence, wipes his hand thoroughly with the already ink stained rag, his back to Neville and to the room. When Neville speaks again he is right behind him. “No, that was unnecessary. I didn’t need to say that. It was mean.”

Severus can hear the soft rustling of Neville’s shirt as he moves, and then feel the heavy, dry warmth of his hand on his shoulder. In a reflexive move he takes a step backwards as he turns to face him, pushes the hand off him with a swoop of his arm. Neville doesn’t seem to mind, just stands where he stood and waits.

“I’m sorry, honestly,” Neville says, his face open and serious. “I’m not right. I know you like what you do. You’re good at it. In a different way than me perhaps, but I know you’re not the kind of teacher you used to be. I know.”

“Not all of us have a calling,” Severus says quietly, his mouth almost disconnected from his mind now. “If I have one it certainly isn’t teaching. Maybe it died with the war.”

“Wizards get so obsessed with the instantaneousness of magic, don’t they? We often forget the work behind the thing. I don’t put much stock in natural gifts for things, or callings for that matter.”

“Yes,” Severus agrees.

“I’m sorry again, for making fun of you like that. It was childish and unnecessary. It was a nice apology and I appreciated hearing it.”

“You never accepted it,” Severus says before he can stop himself.

“What? Yes, I did, didn’t I?” Neville says slowly.

“You never said you forgive me,” Severus says, and then instantly, “You don’t have to. That’s the point, I know that. I shouldn’t have-“

“Of course I accept it,” Neville smiles. “You’re forgiven, Severus.” With a silly flourish of his hand, he mimics the motion of a knighting, a small movement of his hand from over Severus’ shoulder to his other shoulder, or maybe the sign of the cross? Severus can’t quite tell what he’s aiming for. “There. I forgive you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm a sucker for a love letter and romantic sappy pining. hope u liked it!


	4. Repeat

Some days it feels useless, to try so hard, but he trudges on. He thinks of gifts and hard work, and he knows he agrees with Neville on that. And some days, it is surprisingly wonderful. When he talks to Hitchens about the DADA apprenticeship for the summer at St Mungo’s, and the boy looks so surprised and proud that he doesn’t seem to know what to do with himself. Severus had suspected he would like it, Severus himself would also have wanted an excuse to stay out of his house during summer.

“It’s not guaranteed that you’ll get it, of course, but your essay on the Imperius curse was quite interesting. Submit that and I’ll of course write a letter of recommendation. You’ll have a chance.”

As he says thank you, he bows his head a little, a charming although painfully awkward gesture that Severus is sure was unplanned. He feels like he actually cares what happens to him, in the same way he cares about Draco, now a soon to be father. The week after he gives Hitchens the papers to sign for the apprenticeship, Draco asks him to be godfather to his son. He accepts.

“Would you like children?” he asks Neville, not because he imagines it would be something relevant to him, but because he wants to take an interest, even if the answer doesn’t appeal to him. Would he have children with the boyfriend? Or find some woman, settle down with her? Does the boyfriend already have children, perhaps?

“Now?” he asks, a little taken aback. “I don’t think so.”

“Why not?” Severus presses. Is this what his newfound interest in a new, better generation will get him? Nosiness?

“Uh, I guess I…” he stutters uneasily, and Severus watches the side of his face as he frowns, carefully stepping over a root on the path toward the lake, making tracks in the melting snow. Severus falls in line behind him as the trail thins into a trickle of a path, fitting his shoes into the grooves in the snow Neville leaves for him. “I guess I’m busy. I’ve never really thought about it. Why do you ask?”

Severus considers saying something sappy, but just shrugs instead. There’s a limit to sappiness, even in the state he’s in now. “I was curious.”

“I guess I’m lagging behind in that department,” he goes on, after a little bit, when they can see the edge of the water through the trees. “Harry and Ginny, Ron and Hermione, all the Weasleys for that matter. Dean, I heard.”

“Is it something about war, do you think?” he asks him. “It was the same after the first war.”

“You’re probably right,” he smiles. “Being alive, having a future. I don’t blame them.”

 _Them,_ separate, as if he and Neville are their own breed, just the two of them, out here in the wonderful cold and snow, crystal and clean.

“You’re also lagging behind then,” Neville says carefully, keeping his eyes on his feet.

“I suppose you’re right.”

“Do you? Want kids? Some day? Or now, I guess? But I suppose-“ and then, his voice cuts off into a small shout of surprise, and Severus reaches out to grab the green whir of his coat as he slips, on a slick spot of ice neither of them had seen.

“Are you alright?” he asks, his hand still on his arm, half bent over him, as Neville laughs at himself. “Is your arm alright?”

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” he says, still laughing. “Didn’t land on my arm.”

And then, somehow, it gets worse. “Stop laughing.”

Severus’ voice sounds serious enough for Neville to take his advice, and the smile pales. “What?” he asks, almost a whisper. He tries to shift to see what Severus is looking at, but Severus tightens his grip and he stays still.

“Does Venomous Tentacula grow here in the wild?” Severus asks him.

“No, not outside the greenhouses. I’ve seen some versions of the Fanged Geranium in the woods though,” he answers, calm and quick. Reacts to movement, poisonous thorns like teeth, now poised just behind Neville’s head, as if rearing up to strike. “Does it have thorns? Is it moving? Are the leaves sort of reddish at the ends?” he asks, stiff and not moving his head to look for himself.

“Yes,” Severus answers.

“If you give me your hand I’ll get up, it’s going to be fine.”

“On three then,” he says, and on three he tugs, pulling him up towards his own body, holding him upright. He’s never done this, been this close to him, and for a second too long he doesn’t know what to do, just stands there, and then the plant makes a decision, and now it’s his turn to be held up.

It hits him across the side of the face, with one tendril laced with thorns that dig into the skin below his eye and down towards where his jaw meets his ear. It hurts, like a bee sting, and he can feel the throbbing and burning of it as he brings his hands up to his face.

“Hey, hey, sit down. Don’t touch it,” Neville’s voice tells him, but he can’t tell where he is, not exactly, he’s just a blur next to him, tugging at the sleeve of his jacket. His head is swimming, uncomfortably, from the pain and the shock. Neville is backing him up, away from the plant and towards a rock, which he pushes him down to sit on. “I’ll be back,” he says, or maybe says, because Severus is so focused on sitting still, on not touching it, that he can’t quite tell.

He sits there, on the cold, snowy rock, breathing in tempo with the throbbing in his face, and waits for him to come back. A blessing, in a way, that this happened. He’d rushed headfirst into a conversation that he didn’t want to have in the first place. He’d been curious, yes, but he doesn’t actually want to talk about himself anymore. He is interested in Neville’s thoughts, how he perceives the world. His world seems to be an easier one to live in, although harder to achieve.

When Neville gets back, the pain is manageable, but when he touches his face, the skin is warm and tight.

“I told you not to touch it,” Neville says, his hands full of a green mass. His gloves are off, and as he crouches on one knee in front of him, Severus can see more clearly that it’s moss he’s holding, and he can see the patchy red skin on his fingers where the snow and the icy moss is too cold to hold.

“It’s fine now,” Severus mumbles. “We can go back to the castle.”

“You’re not fine,” he says, ignoring Severus’ protests as he mushes the snow and the moss together into a paste in the palm of his hand. “The fanged geranium can crossbreed with other plants quite well, did you know that? I’ve run into this type before around the forest, it’s mixed with some sort of vine, I think. I know it stings. This will help the pain, we’ll do this first and then we’ll go,” he says, and holds his hand up, the heavy smell of the now watery, green sludge in his hand making Severus slightly nauseous.

“Do what?” he asks, as Neville leans in closer, inspects his face.

“You have a few thorns still in there, if it’s alright, I’ll pull them out and put some of the Sphagnum on it?” he says, and his hand hovers in front of Severus’ face, waiting for permission to touch him.

This is not actually a blessing. “Fine,” Severus says, begrudgingly, and then watches as Neville smiles gratefully, places the moss mixture on the rock next to Severus and puts his cold fingers on his skin. “Look that way,” he says, and then pushes Severus’ hair out of the way, behind his ear.

It’s strange, having someone so close to him like this. St Mungo’s was the last time, he thinks, but no, it was the man last summer. He swallows, a cringing and automatic reaction to the arrival of that specific memory in this specific moment and Neville takes that as a reaction to the pain.

“Sorry,” he says, apologetically, as his fingers press into his skin. “I know it hurts. It’s just pain, at least. It’s not going to make your face fall off or anything.”

He continues talking about the plants that do make your face fall off, some article he read about a cactus native to the US, which Severus only half listens to. He watches his face, or the snow in front of him, or their breaths mingling in the cold air. Eventually, Neville dips his fingers in the mixture and carefully starts to apply it in spots underneath his eye, along the line of his jaw, down the parts of his neck that are uncovered above his winter coat, and Severus closes his eyes.

“How does that feel?”

“Better.” His voice is unsteady and too quiet, has the effect of underlining how close they are.

“Sorry to drag you out here. But I guess, good luck I thought to check it out before bringing the students. Now we know this isn’t the route to take, hm?”

Severus hums in response, and Neville laughs at him. “Not that it’s good you got hurt, but it’s-“

“I know what you meant,” he interrupts. The more the pain ebbs away, the more uncomfortable he is. He doesn’t know what to look at, he doesn’t know what to do with his hands. Him touching Severus like this is overwhelming. Everywhere he touches him feels raw and exposed, like the tension in his body is focused on the one spot where his fingers press down. “Who’s coming? On the day trip?” he asks, just to keep him talking, just because he doesn’t trust himself to open his mouth right now or to sit in silence any longer. He might do something stupid.

“Sixth years only, this time. Quite a few of them actually, I think they’ve gotten a little bit of cabin fever in the storm and all. Lucky that Hagrid is coming with, to help me keep track of everyone. And you can come with of course, if you’d like.”

“Hm, maybe.” They’ve spent such an increasingly overwhelming amount of time together during the winter and start of spring that perhaps it would be strange not to come? A contemplation he has to grapple with each time some event happens; would it be strange if he came? If he didn’t come? Can he touch his elbow, is the arm still sore enough to have that excuse? Can he offer to help him carry his papers? Did he say yes too quickly there, should he have said no? Exhausting.

“Hitchens is coming,” he says and then hesitates a little before continuing, “He told me about the summer apprenticeship thing. That was nice of you.”

“Yes, well,” Severus murmurs. “I’ve heard niceness has results sometimes.”

“Oh?” he says, and smiles, and at this distance Severus can see the beginnings of wrinkles by his eyes, can see the stubble by his mouth stretch and crinkle as his mouth quirks upwards.

“He has a chance at it, I think. He’s not stupid,” he says, feeling like he’s holding his breath. Maybe he can play it off as the remnants of pain, not this breathlessness, the racing pulse of the nervousness in his body.

“He has a little crush on you, I think,” Neville says, and smiles when Severus frowns.

“It happens from time to time,” he says, and then adds a small, “Even to me,” so as not to seem conceited.

Neville laughs at that. “Don’t say it like that,” he smiles, and Severus can feel his warm breath against his ear and cheek and neck.

“I’m a rather unconventional choice,” he says, after a moment, as carefully as he can. “For a crush.”

This conversation is so painfully juvenile he might get sick. Or maybe it’s the slimy moss on the side of his face. Either way, it feels like a wrong word could shatter this, crush whatever this conversation is to pieces that can’t be put back together again. But he doesn’t care. That’s also the dangerous thing, he couldn’t care less what he’s saying when he’s with him like this, and at the same time very word and gesture is so utterly important.

“Are you fishing for compliments?” Neville asks, and his fingers are gentle, his voice is gentle.

“No,” Severus mumbles, and as he tries to pull away, Neville brings his hand to the back of his neck to keep him steady and with horrible timing and intensity he can feel the warmth of a blush bloom across his neck and jaw, a response to the warm breath. Neville’s body, eliciting a response in his own.

“You’re handsome,” he says, so preoccupied with what he’s doing that Severus dares to stare at him when he reaches down to grab more of the moss. “And you’re very stern and mysterious. I’d say that makes you a perfect target for a teenage crush.”

He could tell him now, he realises. He could just tell him, now, when his fingers are touching him, when he’s this close, in the cold here by the water where no one will barge in, where it’s just the two of them. _I love you_ , he could just simply say. _I’ve loved you for so long now and it’s fine, you don’t have to say anything, I just wanted you to know._ He could say that, a sentence every fibre of him is hurting for him to say. He could cover Neville’s hand with his own, look at him. That would be enough, maybe, to make his point. He could kiss him, he thinks, and his mouth feels dry and tingly, a phantom pleasure he can’t afford to give in to.

A disaster, he realises later, on the walk back to the castle. It would have been a disaster, if he’d said that. If he’d done that. But it doesn’t stop his body now from screaming at him, every single cell of him echoing this cramp in his stomach. “I-“ he trails off, and Neville seems to notice at least the unease, if not the absolute panic in his chest and he makes a small noise, as if he’s apologising.

“I mean, regardless, you’re right, it happens,” he says quickly, and then his hands are gone, and he is standing up. “How does your face feel now?”

\--

This energy he has, this eagerness to get out of bed, it isn’t just him, this crush he has. It might be because of him, partly, but Severus realises that he might actually be happy, for once. A new and invigorating emotion.

The realisation settles in his stomach over the spring months, slowly, culminating in the conversation he has with Ginny Weasley during one of Potter’s gatherings of the Order of the Phoenix. An exhausting afternoon, filled with Potter’s children, and the Weasley children. She is pregnant again, the third baby now, but it’s still all Potter has been able to talk about. He wonders, not for the first time, how she manages to stand that puppylike admiration every day, all the time.

She catches him as he’s about to leave, as Potter wrangles the children to go to bed and the others are still saying their goodbyes in the living room. He asks her about the children, how the childcare is working, about her Quidditch. It still feels like he’s pretending to be a pleasant person, but it comes easier now.

When he turns to leave, door half open, she hesitates and then steps out with him, closes the door behind them. “I actually wanted to talk to you. Well, Harry did, but he’s been putting it off, the wuss.”

He smiles politely and waits for her to continue, standing on their front steps together with her, the noise of laughter dim through the closed door.

“Well, uh, the thing is…” she starts, and shakes her head, tendrils of bright red hair shifting as she moves. “The new baby, it’s a girl.”

“Congratulations,” Severus says, as she loses steam. “You must be relieved. To not have a house full of boys.”

“Yes, yes I am. Thank you,” she smiles as she talks, beaming in the yellow, late afternoon sunlight. She has a hand on her stomach, absentmindedly. He doesn’t think she notices the gesture herself, but he does, the automatic gentle touch of her hand. And then a calm eye contact, shifting her feet to a wide and determined stance. “Harry wants to name her after his mother.”

And, such a strange thing, he feels happy for them. Genuinely. A warm bloom in his chest, for them, for Lily. For her son, and her blood in his veins, and in the veins of her grandchildren.

“Lily is a beautiful name,” he says, when he realises she is waiting for his response. “It’s a lovely choice.”

“Oh, I’m glad,” she says. “Harry was afraid you’d be… that you’d mind.”

“She was his mother, I don’t have a say,” he says, and he can tell by the quirk in her lip that she agrees. “But I appreciate the warning.”

“I thought I’d tell you before he put his foot in his mouth.”

“She was a wonderful woman,” he continues, without thinking. He honestly believes this and he thinks she would like to hear it. “I think you would have liked each other.”

She looks like she doesn’t know what to respond to that and stands in silence for several moments. She does seem moved, and the silence is heavy and embarrassed.

“Thank you,” she says, finally. “You should come to the baby shower. I know Harry would like you to come. I would also like you to come.”

When he Apparates home, takes the long walk from the village up to the castle in the darkening evening, he thinks of how Lily would approve of her. They are headstrong in the same way, both of them very funny. It is the life she would want for him, finally. He thinks, for a second, of her heavy body in his arms, a thought that is almost bearable now, clearer and less of a mess of guilt and pain each day that goes by. He thinks about Potter, in an abstract way and in a specific way. How it would be nice to tell him about his mother. How it would be the least he could do.

He is touched, in a strange way, by how honest that invitation had been, an honesty he couldn’t have imagined two years ago, or even one. And how easy this conversation was. When he tells this to his therapist, that is what he emphasises, the surprising ease with which this contentment settles in him.

“It hasn’t come easy, Severus,” she counters. “This is the outcome of your hard work. Which doesn’t make it matter less, mind you, but it is continuous work.”

“Yes,” he says. He thinks about happy endings, in novels and songs and poems, and how that isn’t ever true. Nothing ever ends happily, nothing ends at all. But now that doesn’t feel so suffocating anymore. And he is content, he is. He tries his best at his job, he tries his best with his peers. In a few months school will be finished for the term and he will go back to the same work he did last summer, a new city this time, new colleagues. He does good, for himself and for others.

It’s not just Ginny Potter, it’s his colleagues as well, and the students. Minerva stops him in the hallways and talks to him and he doesn’t feel the familiar panic bubbling up in him, doesn’t have the sense that she wants him gone, that he is a burden. Is this how things could have been, all along? An ache, a bittersweet regret over years and years of miserable existence, that he could have done something about, but didn’t. But he is now. He is living differently, now, and she is right, it is hard work.

“I can tell that you’re proud. You deserve to be.”

He is, and he is grateful. To Neville, more than anyone. He brings out the letters, one afternoon in April, just to look at them. The address on the front, as if he’d actually send them, the overwhelming and sappy words that are still true. He watches him sometimes, from afar, walking across the courtyard talking to a group of students, lively and content and so beautiful that it hurts, and he does want something. He does want him. He hasn’t stopped thinking about it, but he has stopped thinking about it as something he has to bear. It is an honour, isn’t it, even to get to speak to him, not a chore. It feels like an honour, when he tells him in the teacher’s lounge that he has leaves in his hair, and he laughs and stands still as Severus plucks it out carefully, using his wand to gently untangle the branch piece from his pale hair.

“I’ll be so angry if you cut my hair off,” he mumbles to him, and laughs when Severus teases him, says it’s too late, tells him he’s already given him a buzzcut. A trilling laugh, like running water in a creek, fresh and cool and clear, and something Severus is responsible for.

He compared him to the sun, all those months ago, and it’s true. Now less overwhelming, less of a glare he needs to squint into, more of a soft warmth, like the sun in the evenings they spend on the roof together, sharing a bottle of something, sometimes eating the latest culinary monstrosity Neville has been experimenting with.

So it’s fine, that this is all he gets. That Neville is with someone else, that he is too good for him either way, that it would never be anything. It’s fine, if he is like the sun, if he can love him from afar. He’s content with that. He puts the letters back in his desk, leaves them in the top drawer, so that sometimes he slides the drawer open and is surprised, that they’re still there, a reminder of the kind of tenderness he is capable of.

\--

He blames that, for what happens, that contentedness that leaves him unwatchful and lazy, and leaves him with this sinking panic in his stomach that spreads to his shaking, frantic hands, as he pulls the drawer out of the desk, turns it upside down and tips out the contents, covering the pile of essays he had been looking over with spare quills, scraps of parchment, old drafts for lesson plans.

But no letters. Nothing at all. No glimpse of the familiar, yellowish envelopes with Neville’s scribbled name and address on it that he has spent so much time looking at. He sits down, empty except for his panic, and thinks.

Hitchens. He told Hitchens to grab the letter of recommendation off his desk, he must have taken the other letters as well. He is the last person that was in here unsupervised, Severus spoke to him after class and told him to grab it and mail it, when he and his friends went into the village for the afternoon excursions they’ve allowed the students, a treat after the winter’s isolation. Because Severus knew they were going, because he’s taken an interest, because he wanted to give Hitchens the opportunity to read the recommendation, to show off in front of his friends.

An idiot. He’s an idiot. He has at least sealed the letters, with a spell he now, after all those years of secret correspondence in the war, does automatically. So that only he can read them. Him and the recipient, the recipient clearly written on the outside of the envelopes, in his spindly handwriting. At least Hitchens won’t be able to open them, but if he has sent them to Neville, then. Then. No, he won’t think about it.

He is an idiot. He steps out of his office with swift steps without even bothering to lock the door, without bothering to clean up the mess on his desk.

As he walks, he anxiously goes over it, the words on those pages, and he concludes Neville simply cannot receive them. He simply can’t let Neville read them. He would be ruined. He won’t think about it, he just won’t think about it. It might not be too late.

He might be able to catch him. He left thirty minutes ago, and knowing teenagers Severus is sure he hasn’t gone straight there, he’s sure he must have stopped, he can’t have delivered the letters yet. And if he has, Severus can ask for them back. They don’t assign the owls and send them out until later in the evening, and Severus’ name is on the letters, he’ll be able to claim them back. He has to be able to. He’ll demand them back.

He sweeps down the path, almost running, when he sees the top of his hat, bobbing as he walks, up ahead, and then the rest of him, dragging his feet along the gravel road. Oh, thank God. He’s heading towards the village and not away from it. He hasn’t delivered them yet. Oh, Christ. He thanks every deity he can think of.

“Oh, hello Professor,” he says, when he hears his footsteps and turns around, sounds surprised that Severus is there, or maybe that he looks so flushed or panicked.

“Have you been to the owlery?” he asks him, no greeting. He just wants them back, his thoughts, he wants to hold them in his hands. He has to destroy them, after this. He can’t keep them anymore, he knows that. He wants, more than anything, to have never written them at all, to have kept everything a secret, like he does, like he knows how to do with everything else. To go back and undo this, to erase the ink from the parchment as if it never happened, as if he never happened.

“No, not yet,” he says and Severus can’t help letting out a breath of relief, audible and heavy.

“Did you take the letters in the drawer?” he asks, relieved now. If he didn’t think physical contact with students was deplorable, he would hug him. “Give them back.”

Hitchens pulls at his cloak, a little awkwardly, and stares at Severus’ outstretched hand. “Uh… The letters to Professor Longbottom?”

“Yes, those letters,” he spits out impatiently. “Give them back.”

“I’m sorry if I shouldn’t have taken them, I just thought that since I was going with the other letter anyway I might as well-“

“It’s fine,” Severus says, trying so hard to keep his voice calm. “I just need them back now, thank you.”

“Uh…” he stalls. “I… I ran into him on the way here.”

Severus can feel his heart beat against his ribs, a deafening, pounding noise that reverberates through his body, settles in his temples and in his hands. Such an agonising reminder of what got him here in the first place, his inability to ignore his body and his thoughts and his existence.

“I gave them to him, I’m sorry,” he stutters, confused. The wind blows against Severus’ face, clear and cool and from the direction of the castle. He presses his fingers into his eyes until he sees spots, as if that’s going to change the reality he’s faced with.

“It’s fine,” he says, finally, in a rush of air. “It’s fine. Just a mix up. When was it you saw him?”

“I don’t know, uh, twenty minutes ago, thirty? He was by the greenhouses, cleaning up after class.”

“Thank you,” he says, backing away toward the castle. There’s no use rushing now.

He’s read them already, he must have.

“Can I, uh…? Professor?” he shouts after him, but when Severus just repeats his mumbled thank you, he shrugs a little, “Alright,” and frowns, turns around to head to the village.

Severus meets other sixth and seventh years on his way back to the castle, who ignore him or nod in his direction, who are laughing and chatting and looking forward to a butterbeer or an ice cream, or to buying new quills or books or socks in the shops. They don’t seem to belong to the same world he does, and he supposes they don’t. He supposes he is alone in this, that he is alone here.

He might not have read them. He might see them as what they are, a mistaken gift, something not actually meant for him. There might still be hope that he hasn’t ruined this, himself, the two of them, but the glimmer of hope vanishes. No. Why would he think that? They’re addressed to him. They have his name on them, and Severus’ name. He will read them and he will know what they are and he will hate it. He will hate him. He will see all that time spent with him as a lie, and a disgusting one at that, and he will hate him for it.

He enters through the gate closest to the greenhouses and braces himself. Without a doubt, he has to talk to him. He has to explain, he can’t ignore it. And on the off chance that the letters are still sealed, unread, he’ll take them back. He’ll just take them back.

He walks across the gravel path to the greenhouse he’s most likely to be in, because he knows his schedule, he knows he’s in Greenhouse three last class on Fridays. Because he has memorised the places he will be at, at which time he will be there, so he can run into him or avoid him or do both at the same time, maybe.

He sees him through the glass windows, his back towards him, framed in green leaves and vines and distorted by the uneven glass. A perfect, still and calm picture, like it should be. Severus on the other side of glass, looking. He takes a breath and walks through the open door.

It doesn’t look like he’s cleaned up anything, and as Severus walks closer to him he can see why. There they are, his pages, his words, strewn across the desk at the back of the room, Neville leaning over them. When he hears his steps, he turns around, and he has one in his hand. Severus can’t tell which one.

“Severus,” he says, with surprise, a tone that says nothing about what he thinks about the letters, what he thinks about Severus now.

“Did you read them?” he asks, and Neville looks down at the parchment in his hands, at the rest of them on the desk. He nods. “All of them?” Severus asks, and again, Neville nods.

They stand there, Neville looking at the mess of papers on his desk, Severus staring at him.

“I can explain,” he tries, and thinks that maybe an explanation will come to him as he talks. “I… they’re not for you.”

“They’re not for me?” Neville mumbles, almost to himself. He smiles, uncertainly. “They’re addressed to me, Severus, I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean, they’re not… I didn’t mean for you to, to read them.” He looks down at his hands, see them shaking and tightens his fingers and relaxes them. He takes an unsteady step forward, talks louder, as if that will help. “They were in my desk when Hitchens went to get his recommendation letter, I didn’t… I didn’t know he didn’t know the difference between one letter on top of the desk and several letters in a drawer in the desk, you’re not supposed to have them. I didn’t mean for-“

“Several,” Neville says, and it takes a second for Severus to realise he is repeating what he said. “Ten of them. When did you write these?”

Severus is quiet, because he knows he can’t lie to him now.

“This one is dated June 4th. A year ago. That’s… How long have you…?”

Severus turns so that he’s standing with his side to him. He can’t look straight at him right now, so he keeps his eyes on his hands, that have thankfully stopped shaking. It’s over now. He can admit it.

“Longer than a year,” he says, quietly. “Probably. Since you came to teach, since we started spending time together. But I don’t… I don’t know.”

He holds on to the worktable in the middle of the room, feeling the ridges of its wood dig into his palms and not feeling anything else at all except the pounding of his heart in his hands, and they’re quiet for a few moments. “Not that I… That’s not why I apologised. I haven’t been… I know you don’t feel the same way and I…”

Neville starts to say something, and Severus desperately holds on to the table, barges over his words. This isn’t working how he’d imagined it. Of course he has imagined it, the way people fantasise about things that are never going to happen. “I know you’re with him, the… that man that came to visit last year, and even if you weren’t I know that you would never-“

“You know a lot, Severus,” he interrupts, firm, “But regretfully not everything about what I would do.”

Severus glances up at him, at the serious angle of his eyebrows, the slack surprise in his jaw. “We haven’t been together for months,” Neville says, quietly, and then, for some reason, laughs. The wonderful laugh that Severus loves, and he closes his eyes to it, can’t bear to hear it. It burns against the side of his face.

“I didn’t know that.”

“I know,” Neville says. “I didn’t tell you. You never seemed to like it when I talked about him, which I thought was just you being, I don’t know, uncomfortable with the idea. That he was a man, or the idea in general. Some people just don’t like that sort of thing. Relationships.”

“No, that wasn’t it,” Severus says and then he too laughs, a noise that sounds desperate and slightly crazed. He can see the humour in that, at least. That wasn’t it at all.

Severus breathes, a slow and tense breath to steady himself. It is funny.

“Do you feel that way now? Do you still feel like you say in the letters?” he asks, and Severus meets his pale eyes. He looks so serious and tender and calm, as he puts the paper down on his desk, the fluttery noise of it insulting and over too soon for something so monstrously important, and then there’s only silence.

He doesn’t know what to do here. He never gets this far in his mind. Or it jumps to later, later when he has said all of it, when Neville knows, when he can touch him and know that Neville knows him, and that he feels the same.

“Yes,” he gets out, a sound every part of his body tries so hard to stifle. “Yes,” he repeats, louder. He’s not ashamed of it. He’s trying very hard not to be ashamed.

“This is a lot, Severus,” he says. “A lot all at once.”

Yes, it is. What does he mean, when he says that Severus doesn’t know what he would do? Does Severus owe it to him, to have Neville’s opinion on his feelings? This thing is private. It’s his own, as much as the blood making his head swim is his own, as much as his hands gripping the table are his own.

“What do you… What are you thinking?” he asks, aware of his steady voice, aware of his expression.

Neville shakes his head. “I don’t know. I… I didn’t think you felt this way. Why didn’t you… Why didn’t you say something?”

“Why would I have said something? What should I have said?” Severus says, too hurriedly and too heated. “There wasn’t any… There wasn’t any hope that you…”

“Did you ever think to ask me?” he asks, and sounds like he’s trying very hard to stay calm. “Is this why you stopped talking to me? Why you ignored me after last summer?”

“I…” It’s all he thought of, always. “Neville-”

“You know what, no, stop talking,” he says and squeezes his eyes shut. “This isn’t me in these letters. You can’t possibly think I’d be… I’m not this unattainable,” he finishes, flushed and angry.

“You are,” Severus says, quietly. “You’re wonderful.” He hopes the word contains all he wants it to.

“So are you, you idiot,” he nearly shouts at him, and this is the angriest Severus has seen him be, ever since they spoke after the panel talk. “Why would I spend this much time with you if I thought you were horrible?”

Severus stands still, as Neville walks closer and closer, step after steady step. When he touches Severus’ cheek, he twitches. It feels like it stings at first, the touch, and then it is just warm and heavy and dry. His hand on his cheek, on his jaw, moves to shift Severus’ head up, so he can meet his gaze.

“What do you want, Severus?” he asks, such a simple question that Severus has such a simple answer to. He wants him. Just him. To have for his own, to stay with, to touch. He wants Neville this close, he wants him to stay steady and warm and firm.

He relaxes into him, his muscles give out and he lets Neville hold him up, buries his face in his shoulder, where his shirt bunches up, breathes him in, the smell of earth and coffee and the heavy, metallic smell of ink. He lets it fill him up, until there is nothing left, until there is nothing in him left untouched. He wishes he could melt, turn into vapour, disappear in this. Drift away across the grass on the wind, close his eyes and be nothing but this.

And then the crunching noise of gravel on the path outside the door and suddenly Severus is dimly aware of the fact that they’re standing in a glass box, that anyone can see them. Neville is gone, that too disturbingly sudden, first the warmth of his body and then the comforting weight of his hand on his chest.

Two girls show up in the doorway, looking serious in the way only teenagers are capable of, bored and unaware.

“Professor Longbottom,” one of them says, and then as slightly surprised afterthought, “Professor Snape.”

“Hello there,” Neville says, smiling nervously and widely at them, but Snape can only nod. He doesn’t trust himself to talk.

“Headmaster McGonagall sent us to get you,” the other one says. “She says you’re supposed be with the others in Hogsmeade.”

He watches as Neville closes his eyes and nods. “Right,” he says, and glances over at Severus, a quick and unnoticeably important look to acknowledge that Severus is the reason he is here right now in the first place. “Right, it slipped my mind. Sorry you had to make the trip, girls.”

“We were coming back to the school anyways,” the first one says, as if she doesn’t want even the slightest hint that they went out of their way, and then stares at them, with big, serious brown eyes. “She sounded pretty annoyed. We’re supposed to make sure you get there soon. Yousef got in trouble with one of the shopkeepers.”

She says the last bit with a semi amused smirk, and her friend snorts out a laugh. Severus doesn’t know who that is, doesn’t know the students first names by heart, but he assumes it’s a Gryffindor, since Neville is the Head of House, and it’s his responsibility, and since Neville acknowledges the name with a nod.

“I’ll be right there,” he tells them, and when they keep standing in the doorway, he adds, “You can go along to the Great Hall, it’s alright. Don’t want to be late for dinner.”

“Whatever,” one of them says, even though it’s at least an hour and a half until dinner and the sentence doesn’t make sense. She swoops her bangs out of her face before she leaves, and then they stand there in the silence, listening to their steps and their voices grow fainter in the afternoon air.

Neville turns back to the letters on the desk, carefully picks them up and places each one in an envelope, disappearing into his office. And then he’s back, looking at Severus, as if there’s a difference between the words on the pages he’s holding and Severus himself. “I should go see to that,” he says, with a nod in the vague direction of the village.

“Yes,” Severus says, feeling like his body isn’t his own. Who is he kidding, it isn’t. If it belongs to anyone it’s to Neville. He stands in the empty classroom as Neville picks up his things, feeling numb and confused.

“I’ll… I’ll come see you after dinner tonight,” he says, and looks just as dishevelled and disconnected as Severus feels. “I’ll be back by nine at the latest, depending on how much of a mess this is.”

Severus doesn’t know what to say.

“Are you alright? We’ll talk about this later?”

“Yes,” Severus says, finally, and Neville is out the door, the sound of his shoes on the gravel outside slowly disappearing in the distance. He stands there for ten, fifteen minutes, breathing and looking up at the dim glass ceiling. He allows himself panic and fear, now, but since there’s nothing, nothing at all to hold on to either way, he can’t shake it off.

He walks slowly through the school, his body feeling foreign and his head swimming. That’s exactly what it feels like, like his entire head is full of water, like he’s in over his head. He walks without thinking, up into the main building, into the Great Hall, almost empty now, too early for dinner still. He thinks maybe he went here because it’s what Neville mentioned.

Nine o’clock. When is nine o’clock? He must have something to do until then? He could go back to his quarters, but the idea of sitting there for hours, waiting for Neville to knock on the door, seems unbearable. He could go back to his office, but he remembers the mess he left there and doesn’t want to look at it anymore, can’t bear to look at his own handwriting.

Things feel unreal, the stone under his feet feels unreal, the voices and quiet laughter of the few students in the hall seem far away as he passes them and sits down at the end of the U-shaped faculty table.

What did this tell him? What did they actually say? He should have kissed him. He should have just leaned in and kissed him, instead of whatever kind of slumping into his arms he actually did. He can still smell him on his robes, he realises, or his skin or his hair. He’d just been so tired. The tension of it had been exhausting, and the release of that tension had left him empty and confused.

What if he changes his mind? Changes his mind from what? What did Neville say? That he was frustrated with him, that Severus doesn’t know what he thinks or feels. He isn’t with the expat anymore. A relief, maybe, or maybe a terrifying fact. Severus doesn’t know what to do with any of this, a situation he doesn’t like to be in. He usually has a plan. A poor plan, perhaps, but at least some idea of what to do.

He sits there and stares down at the table, until he remembers he has his class notes in his pockets and can stare at those pages until he thinks of what to do.

He keeps thinking of Neville’s hand on his cheek, resting against his jaw. It felt right. Neville can’t possibly think it didn’t feel right. Slowly, the students increase in number, the small groups of them expand and meld together, student by student. No sixth or seventh years, they are allowed to eat in the village today. Right. Nine o’clock, since Neville is chaperoning and will eat with them. His colleagues find their way to the faculty table as well, Draco arrives and sits down at the opposite end, thankfully deep in conversation with Hagrid about student safety or something or other. Severus can’t hear them and can’t muster up the energy to move seats. He doesn’t want to move seats and risk stuttering and stammering, blushing or shaking. His pulse races. He isn’t bad at concealing his emotions, but this is different. Who is he concealing it from now? He is beyond that, he is beyond pretending that he doesn’t care about this, or about Neville. He physically cannot do it, can feel his hands start trembling as soon as he tries. His treacherous body, shouting truth even when he isn’t sure he wants it to.

Nine o’clock. He wonders where Neville is now, and that goes into imagining him walking back to the castle, and that moves to thinking of his reddening skin in the cold. He hasn’t allowed himself to fantasise like this in a long time, not since before the summer, when he had the protection of not having admitted it to himself yet. He wonders what he would taste like, what it would feel like to kiss him, finally.

He stares down at the unclear letters in his notebook, breathes and calms himself. He’s waited for worse than this, he knows, but it doesn’t feel like it. The ink on the pages doesn’t seem to mean anything, seems to just be ink blots and scratches, he can’t make out a thing.

“Severus,” he hears beside him, and his good luck is gone.

Severus swallows and looks up into Slughorn’s benevolent and slightly uninterested face. “Good afternoon,” he says, a tad stiffly, but his voice sounds surprisingly normal. And Slughorn doesn’t pay attention at the best of times, and seems distracted by the upcoming exams, won’t stop talking about how he misses the days when he could ask the houseelves to shine his shoes, the new laws with rights for magical creatures, blah blah. Severus just needs to nod and grunt in response. He can do that.

And then Minerva is there, in the middle of the table, leaning over to offer Slughorn her scathing review of old men’s opinions, and she at least pays attention. Severus wants to flee.

“Professor Longbottom.” Minerva says it with the pleasure she always says it with, as if she is all too pleased with herself for choosing him for the teaching position, and Severus can’t flee. He looks up into Neville’s flushed face. “How are you?”

Neville leans on the table in front of Severus for a second, swallowing. “I’m good, thanks,” he says. “No worries, I just… I just ran a little bit.”

“All the way from Hogsmeade? Is everything alright?”

“Not all the way,” he says, and shakes his head, waves his hand in front of his face in a vague and unconvincing gesture of ‘it’s fine’.

“I heard about the commotion,” Slughorn says. “Of course, I was on my way back to the school already, otherwise I, of course would have-“

“Absolutely, Horace,” Neville interrupts, and looks straight at Severus. “Could I borrow you for a second?”

Severus nods, and realises he has to say something. “Of course,” he murmurs, and Neville breathes out a heavy breath again. And smiles.

“Great,” he says, as if Severus has given him something, a gift, and when Slughorn starts talking again, he doesn’t tear his eyes away from him.

“Oh, is the matter delicate?” He frowns and seems to gain momentum again. “I know that Severus was a very beloved Head of House, Longbottom, but the honour has fallen on me yet again. And I know you’re quite new and perhaps don’t know the etiquette for these things, but-“

Slughorn’s voice grows dimmer and dimmer, until Severus can’t hear anything but his blood rushing through his body. This is a yes. This is a decision.

Slughorn, now unintentionally revealing that he is fully aware there were Slytherins involved in whatever the business was down in Hogsmeade this afternoon, and that he shirked his responsibilities on purpose because he didn’t want to miss dinner, breaks through the mist Severus has sunken into.

“Horace,” Neville interrupts again, louder over Slughorn’s indignant protests, “I assure you, if there is an issue with any of the Slytherins, I’ll come talk to you.”

He sounds so firm that Severus doesn’t know what to say.

“I’m just aware that both of you have, not to put too serious a tinge on this lovely afternoon, because I heard the house elves were preparing that lovely spring onion soup for tonight, but both of you have offered certain special attention to some of the Slytherins. I mean, honestly, Severus, that apprenticeship-” Slughorn continues, and this time he is interrupted by the noise of Severus’ chair over the stone floor.

Severus walks around the table and past Neville towards the entrance to the faculty room adjoining the Great Hall, as if in a daze. His body moves on its own, and he hears Neville follow him, and Slughorn’s half hearted protests at getting interrupted.

He doesn’t look at him until he can hear Neville close the door behind them, lock it, and then stride past him to lock the other door as well. Severus stares at him.

“Did you solve it, the-?” he asks, as if that’s what they’re here to discuss, and before he can finish, Neville has kissed him. A small peck on his lips and then when Severus doesn’t protest, the full weight of his body leaning against him, and Neville’s hands on his jaw and then in his hair. Severus stumbles backwards a step before finding his balance and leaning into it, the press and shift of his lips and his body. Neville breathes in, deep through his nose, as if he’s lost his breath, as if he wants to breathe him in.

“I shouted at the shopkeeper at Honeydukes,” he admits, and it takes a second for Severus to see the relevance, because he is so close, he is so warm. He doesn’t have to speak louder than a whisper, and when Severus huffs out the smallest of breaths, Neville interprets it as the laugh it is.

“Why?” he asks, and Neville puts his own hand over the one that Severus is resting on his chest.

“It was dumb to go, I shouldn’t have gone. I changed my mind halfway there and I just kept thinking I should be here with you and he was being such an ass about everything so I may have lost my temper a little bit.”

Severus shifts the slightest bit and their mouths meet again. He’s never seen Neville lose his temper at anyone other than himself, and this is endearing. He feels honoured.

He seems like he would be soft when Severus touches him, but when he slips his hand underneath Severus’ robes, over the fastening of his vest in the low of his back and presses him closer, he is fully unmalleable, unwavering. His stubble itches against Severus’ cheek as he uses his other hand to push Severus’ face closer, one hand at the back of his neck to guide him firmly to where he wants him to be. He seems so in control of what he wants and where and how. Severus’ cheeks burn at the thought that what he wants is him.

He realises, in the middle of this, that he is allowed to touch him back, that he can run his fingers over the soft fabric of his cardigan and the buttoned up shirt underneath, and he does, less and less careful as he goes. He is allowed now, he is offered something, and he feels greedy when he takes it. His fingers press down on the softness of his waist and Severus feels like crying at how real this is. This is for him, it is real, he is here.

“Did you run all the way here?” he repeats Minerva’s question, and Neville tilts his head a little.

“Maybe,” he murmurs. His face this close looks wonderful, alert and happy. His cheeks are flushed and when Severus brings his fingertips up to the splotchy red skin for just a second, he feels the warmth of his blood rushing through his body, pooling there underneath his cheekbones. Severus closes his eyes and when he speaks, his voice is embarrassingly hoarse.

“Do you want to go back in there? Dinner?”

“We can have dinner in my rooms.”

“They’ll wonder where we went.”

“Let them wonder then.”

\--

They talk. They have things to talk about. Mostly they sit in the sofa in front of Neville’s fireplace, absentmindedly picking at the cheese and bread and fruit that Neville had in his cupboards and in the fridge, and Severus gets used to being able to reach out and find him there, next to him.

“I was afraid I was being obvious,” Severus hears himself say, not knowing how he wants to be reassured.

“When are you ever obvious?” Neville asks, and takes a sip from his wineglass. He’s teasing him. After a small silence, he puts the glass down on the side table. “Can I ask you… Did you… did you take the picture I took of you? The one I put up on the wall?”

Severus stares into his own glass, taps his fingers against it to stall. “I did.”

“Really?” Neville laughs gleefully, and then brings a hand up to stifle it. “Oh, no.”

“Why?”

Neville buries his head in his hands, half embarrassed and half amused. “Henry said you did, but I was sure he took it down himself.”

“Henry?” Severus says, the word tasting foul. “The expat?”

Neville nods and the thought of the two of them discussing him without him knowing it is slightly sickening. “I thought he was being paranoid and jealous, but I guess he just read you better than I did.”

Neville tells him he hasn’t heard from him since before Christmas, when they broke it off. “He slept with his assistant. Which shouldn’t be such a surprise, since I was his assistant when we got together. I wasn’t very upset. We were running on fumes for a long time before we finally broke it off for good. Being unfaithful was doing me a favour, if anything.”

Severus is satisfied with that. He thinks of Draco telling him they were ‘on and off’, but it doesn’t sound like that’s what this is.

“Do you still have it? The picture?”

“Somewhere. I’ll look. You can have it back.”

“Yes, please,” Neville smiles. “Starting a relationship out with hidden stolen goods doesn’t sound very promising. If… if that’s what you want?”

It is so strange, to be the one with this offered to him. He’s never been in this position. He’s never been in a relationship where he cared so much.

“Yes,” he says. He tries to explain why he took the picture, why he got so angry with himself and which leads into explaining how that anger had nothing to do with avoiding him all fall and winter, but the words stumble out of his mouth confused and inept. Neville reaches across the sofa and puts a hand on his knee, calm and heavy.

“I get it. We’ll take more pictures, either way.”

“I wasn’t angry with you,” he says, weakly. “If you were happy with him then I wanted to let you be happy.”

Neville looks at him like he understands that this is him not trying to repeat his mistakes, and he nods. He understands. Severus swallows a piece of bread with slight difficulty and they sit in a stretched out but not uncomfortable silence. This isn’t easy either, but does it matter? Does this mean then, that Severus has a chance at making him happy?

“My friends say I have a type,” Neville says. “Luna and Ginny and the others. ‘Complicated, competent, greying and a bit of a dick’, is how they describe it, I think.”

At that, Severus laughs, all the frustration at his own inability to communicate washed away from his mind.

“Is that supposed to be me or him?”

“Both of you, I guess,” Neville smiles carefully. “I don’t think that’s the point though. It’s not about either of you, it’s about me. Attraction and admiration are basically the same thing, aren’t they?”

Severus doesn’t know if he agrees with that, but he stays quiet.

“You’re attracted to the things you lack, you admire the things you want. You’re a part of the reason I wanted to be a teacher. I mean, I don’t want to be a dick,” Neville says, with the implication that Severus has been a dick. He has. “But you’re… You’ve always been able to be so sure, of things.”

Severus definitely does not agree with this.

“Don’t laugh,” Neville protests. “I mean that… I had a lot of very complicated feelings about you for a long time. I value kindness in a way you never used to. I think you were very angry and you took it out on people who couldn’t defend themselves. You were horrible to a lot of people, including me, sure. But you were always…. I don’t know, I’m making a mess of explaining what I mean.”

“It’s alright,” Severus says, so aware of everything, every little wonderful gesture he does. Neville could tell him whatever he wants right now, and he still would only be fixated on where his knee touches Neville’s ankle on the cushion between them.

“No, I didn’t want to start this with saying how horrible you used to be,” Neville says. “That’s not what I wanted to say. You wrote such lovely letters and-“

“Thank you. As we’ve observed, it is easier to write things down than to say them.”

“I just mean to say that you’re… Steadfast, is that a good word? You are all the things I never could be when I was younger, good and bad, and I’ve worked very hard to be competent and proud and stand up for myself and all that.”

“Sure,” Severus says, unconvinced. He doesn’t think any of those things started in him, he thinks Neville had that in him from before he ever met Severus, but fine. He doesn’t think he could stop Neville talking now even if he wanted to.

“And then, coming back here, when you were so nice to me. You’ve been so kind and different. It’s like all those things I wanted and then now, in the way I wanted them. In you. I love you for that. I love you. I should have realised that sooner.”

He looks straight at him, like it’s an undeniable, unwavering fact that isn’t for Severus to argue with.

“I’m sorry I was so angry before. The letters were lovely but it’s a lot to live up to,” he says, and a few moments later, “I never get as angry as I get with you. I never feel anything as much as I do with you.”

Severus leans over to let his head slump against Neville’s chest and they sit like that for a long time. One of the things Severus loves about him, will love for a long time, is this. How steady he is, how funny, how unwaveringly he wants to be understood and known.

He stays the night that night, and they get horribly, joyfully drunk together. Severus undresses, awkward and unsure, and they sleep, just sleep, together in Neville’s warm bed. He wakes up with a hangover and a confusion that just grows when he sees Neville in the bed next to him, that settles in his stomach as an almost painful burning warmth. The early summer sunlight shines through the window, and he looks at Neville, still sleeping, his leg pressed against him underneath the covers. With careful fingers, he brushes the hair out of his face and Neville drowsily shifts and yawns.

“Oh, you’re awake,” he murmurs. “I wanted to make you breakfast.”

Severus kisses him, despite his protests of bad breath, and he is content, he is happy. He could lie here, a monument to nothing but how lovely it is to stay in bed with someone he loves. “No classes today,” Severus says. “We have time.”

“You’re right,” he says, closes his eyes again. “So we can sleep a bit longer then.”

“I, uh, wanted to ask you whether you… I want to see you this summer,” Severus says. “If you wanted to…”

“What?” Neville opens his eyes and watches him blearily, his face still relaxed and soft.

“I’m going back to work with the… the thing for the potions association. But I could ask them to put me up in a bigger apartment this time. I will be working most of the time, but I’ll get days off. And evenings. And there’s an interesting library by the-“

“You don’t have to convince me,” Neville smiles at him. “I don’t have plans for the summer. That sounds wonderful. A vacation?”

“Yes, in a way,” Severus says, his face smarting just from looking at him.

“I’ve been on a vacation with a partner before. I’ve never had anyone write me love letters before, either,” he says, and when Severus coughs in response, he nudges his stomach lightly and then kisses him, his lips warm and soft, his jaw and throat firm and determined.

They have sex, slow and careful, until it isn’t slow and careful anymore, and Neville is so good. It’s like kissing him, he is sure of what he wants, and Severus is pliant and feels young in a way he hasn’t before. Pressing his face into the pillows that smell like him, Neville’s steady hands on his hips, knowing he there is nothing he can do to that will make Neville’s belief and trust in him waver. He’s never had this, never felt this before. It’s new, and he is overwhelmed that it was in him for Neville to find.

Afterwards, Neville kisses his side, slings his arm over his waist and lays there, still and comfortable. He presses his nose into the crook of Severus’ neck, and he kisses the scar there before he settles.

There are steps after this, sure, but the part that Severus would be most difficult is telling people, and it isn’t at all. Neville has several heated conversations with his grandmother, but he’s made it clear to both of them that her opinion isn’t going to change anything, and that she can respect.

They go to the Potters’ baby shower together, and Neville makes it clear there as well, putting a hand on the low of his back, or offering him a bite of the sickly sweet cake, and that’s that. Potter and his wife disappear into the kitchen at one point and when they come back, Potter grins happily at the two of them like he has had something explained to him there, and Severus doesn’t find the enthusiasm quite as vile when it’s on his own behalf.

They sit in the backyard of the Potters’ house and talk and eat cake, and when Severus gets too antsy of the small talk he excuses himself and walks to the bathroom, splashes water over his face and on his way out he stops by the gift table and looks at the pastel coloured packaging, the garish and happy cards. _Congratulations!_ and _Good luck!_ and _Welcome, Lily!_

He puts the card down and thinks of repetition and the persistence of things. He thinks of second chances and time and change. He might not know what kind of a man he is, but when he walks out into the afternoon sunlight and Neville looks at him from across the lawn, he knows what kind of man he wants to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is it! thanks for reading!


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